[HCLSIG Demo] Ontowiki as a GUI, SWAN, Neurocommons

Ontowiki:

I was asked to assess the usability of Ontowiki [1,2] for the purposes of our Demo. I can say that it appears to be useful for the visualisation (and not to forget: for editing) most of the data we are dealing with in our planned demo, as long as most of the information is expressed as individuals and not as classes. It could definitely be useful for viewing/editing SWAN hypotheses. Unfortunately, I was not able to test this, because the latest version of the SWAN OWL ontology (swan20070301.owl) has a broken owl:import, and Ontowiki refuses to load it. I also tried loading the current Neurocommons OWL ontology (annotations.owl), and it worked fine. 

Ontologies that are solely based on classes (like the NeuronDB ontology) cannot be usefully visualised / edited with Ontowiki, however. As far as I know, this is true for all other RDF/OWL browsers currently available. This is the main reason why I would like to avoid extensive use of classes (and why my ontology papers are rejected by purist reviewers).

There is a simple mechanism by which images can be displayed directly in the Ontowiki system. In the configuration of Ontowiki, you can list datatype properties whose value will be resolved. If the value is a URL pointing to an image file, this image file will be displayed inside the wiki system. I guess it should be possible to use this feature in the demo (visualisations are good, visualisations inside the interactive wiki system would be even better).

Regarding the stability of the current version of Ontowiki (0.94), it seems okay, but there are some bugs left to catch. I could not get it running on all Apache/PHP/MySQL installations I tried. It is also easily irritated when confronted with incosistend ontologies.

However, these are minor concerns, and it seems the group behind Ontowiki is very interested in biomedical applications. I guess they would assist us if we would choose to use it in the demo.
	
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SWAN, Neurocommons:

I see a lot of convergence between the forthcoming OWL versions of the SWAN ontology and the neurocommons ontology. Since both are still not officially released, I think it would be worthwhile to attempt to integrate both ontologies into one. This would be very, very useful for both projects.

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cheers,
Matthias Samwald


[1] http://aksw.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/Projects/Powl
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2007Jan/0229.html










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Received on Tuesday, 13 March 2007 14:21:38 UTC