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

Hi all,

I have evaluated Ontowiki as well. I think it is interesting and one of 
the few example available for building a web application on the top of 
an RDF/OWL knowledge base and to do editing, not only browsing (by the 
way, this sounds quite strange to me, it's Semantic Web and we haven't 
much to build the Web part...).

However Ontowiki is written in PHP, I'd like to know more about its 
performance. A second point is about how much OWL it understands. It 
seems not so much in practice.

Finally, I see that Sam had my same experience about the code maturity 
and stability. I had several problems in having it running and 
eventually I have an installation where bugs are still too frequent.



samwald@gmx.at wrote:
> 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.  --- 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.
> 
> ---
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .


-- 

===============================================================================
Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk>
http://gca.btbs.unimib.it/brandizi

Received on Friday, 16 March 2007 13:40:02 UTC