Re: Ontology editor + why RDF?

On Mar 30, 2006, at 6:36 AM, deWaard, Anita (ELS) wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> A quick question that I was hoping this forum might have some  
> thoughts on: we are looking for a new editing tool for our life  
> science thesaurus EMTREE (proprietary, multi-facted  
> polyhierarchical, 260 k terms (50 k preferred, 210 k+ synonyms), >  
> 10,000 nodes) and I am trying to convince the thesaurus department  
> to go to an RDF-based editor. I was wondering if anyone had any  
> thoughts on
> a- the best professional-grade ontology editor to use (serious  
> alternatives to Protege?), and

I'm going to refrain from saying "Best", but I would highly recommend  
having a look at SWOOP http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/

It has a built-in, high quality, reasoner, is quite fast, and has  
facilities that can help a lot with debugging.
http://www.mindswap.org/2005/debugging/

> b- the best arguments to convince my company to start using RDF,  
> both internally and externally.

This would, of course depend on what you are trying to accomplish. I  
would say that for an organization looking towards the future, I  
expect that RDF and OWL will, by virtue of being standards, will  
attract a continually growing audience and generate a growing pool of  
people who are skilled in the technology - something very good for  
making sure one can hire people to maintain and feed your thesaurus.  
In addition, as more high quality ontologies which touch on your  
interests start to make their appearance in these standard formats,  
you ought to be able to make easy use of them if you are using the  
same technology.


> Thanks for any comments!
>
> Anita
> Anita de Waard
> Advanced Technology Group, Elsevier
> Radarweg 29, 1043 NX Amsterdam
> +31 20 485 3838
> a.dewaard@elsevier.com

Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 19:37:55 UTC