TEST: Tools and implementation

As per the action to describe our tools and tests

The MINDSWAP project at the Univ of Md (see http://www.mindswap.org/) 
is working on creating tools to support the "life cycle" of semantic 
annotations on the web.  This includes tools for creating large OWL 
instance documents (tied to ontologies) from excel spread sheets, 
data bases, and HTML web pages,  and also tools for using ontologies 
in the authoring and markup of web resources.  We are also working on 
scalable triple stores for querying the graphs created by OWL tools. 
Details of these tools, and open source code for most of them, can be 
found on the web site, there is also a paper there (to appear in EKAW 
02) which describes them in more detail.

Directly related to the goals of OWL implementation are the RDF 
Instance Creator (RIC) and the SMORE RDF Editor.  These tools import 
ontological information from OWL documents and help the user in 
creating instances and/or marking up documents.  RIC, in particular, 
does "type checking" on objectClass properties (i.e. it uses 
restrictions to determine if you can use an object or if it violates 
the implicit range constraints), enforces cardinality restriction, 
and does property inheritance in determining what properties to offer 
for a particular class the user wishes to create.  Thus, RIC is 
intended to be able to read OWL ontologies (at least in the owl-lite 
class) and help users create legal (and only legal) instances 
interactively.

RIC's parser will be "OWL aware" in that it will handles\ most of the 
OWL constructs correctly (it currently does this for D+O), including 
following namespaces and the like. We thus believe that RIC will be 
run against sample ontologies and examples to "earn its gold star" as 
a parser and authoring tool.

  - Jim Hendler

p.s. RIC was implemented, and is still maintained, by Michael Grove - 
a former student now working at Fujitsu Labs of America, College Park.


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 09:59:43 UTC