tools supporting the location of ontologies

*** Apologies for multiple postings ***

Efficient ontology sharing and reuse is rather difficult, 
as it is hard to find and share ontologies available among
the community due to the lack of standards for documenting 
and annotating ontologies with metadata information.

In order to improve ontology sharing and reuse, we are 
happy to announce the release of a first inventory of tools
supporting the location of ontologies: 

..-  OMV:  Ontology Metadata Vocabulary 
    OMV is a metadata scheme describing 
     ontologies and ontological content
    (http://omv.ontoware.org)

..-  Oyster: Decentralized Ontology repository 
    for managing, searching and exchanging metadata 
    about ontologies in  a P2P network.
    (http://oyster.ontoware.org)

..-  Onthology.org: Centralized Ontology repository 
    that uses the OMV metadata schema to describe,
    classify, access, evaluate and store ontologies.
    (http://www.onthology.org)

Your participation can take a variety of forms. 
You can annotate your ontologies with OMV and
make them available in the repositories, you can 
generate the OMV metadata directly from your ontology 
development tool, you can also have
an active commitment and participation in further development 
activities, etc.

Thank you for your interest.

Asuncion Gomez-Perez
Rudi Studer

 Acknowledgements
 This work is based on extensive discussions and many helpful
 comments and feedback from academia and industry. Especially
 we would like to thank our partners and colleagues from the EU
 Network of Excellence Knowledge Web for their present and future
 collaboration.
 --------------------------------------------------------------

 
 *** OMV (Ontology Metadata Vocabulary), a metadata scheme describing
 ontologies and ontological content from a multitude of perspectives.
 The metadata scheme, currently implemented by means of the 
 OWL language, is compatible to standardized general-purpose metadata 
 formats like Dublin Core and can be integrated in various 
 ontology management facilities, from central ontology repositories
 to sharing ontologies across the Web.
 
 For more information please visit http://omv.ontoware.org
 
 For further information do not hesitate to contact:
 
 Elena Paslaru Bontas
 Institute of Computer Science
 Free University of Berlin
 Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany
 +49 30 838 75224
 paslaru@inf.fu-berlin.de
 
 
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 
*** OYSTER is a Java-based system exploiting
 Semantic Web technologies to implement facilities by which 
 ontology developers can manage, search and exchange metadata  
 about ontologies in a P2P network.
 The usage of a pre-defined ontology metadata model (in this 
 case the OMV) provides a means for Oyster peers to comfortably search for (reusable)
 ontologies and to publish or advertise their own ontological sources
 across the network at early ontology development stages.
 
 Oyster can be freely downloaded at http://oyster.ontoware.org,
 where you will also find useful information about the functionality
 and usage of the system.
 
 For further information do not hesitate to contact:
 Raul Palma
 Ontology Engineering Group
 Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial
 Facultad de Informatica
 Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
 oyster@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es
 
 
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 *** ONTHOLOGY - An Anthology of Ontologies http://www.onthology.org is
 an ontology repository using the OMV metadata schema to describe,
 classify, access, evaluate and store ontologies. Due to its
 metadata-driven nature the repository allows ontology developers and
 users to implement different levels of sharing and reuse of
 ontologies, from freely publishing to marketing ontological content
 under specific usage licences.
 
 The ontology metadata repository uses
 the collaborative software and ontology engineering platform OntoWare
 (http://www.OntoWare.org). At http://ontoware.org/projects/onthology,where the 
 up-to-date  software version, news, examples and reference applications
 can be found as well.
 
 For further information do not hesitate to contact:
 Jens Hartmann
 Institute AIFB
 University of Karlsruhe, Germany
 http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/
 hartmann@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de


-- 
Asunción Gómez-Pérez
Ontology Engineering Group
Facultad de Informática
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Campus de Montegancedo, sn
Boadilla del Monte, 28660, Spain
Home page: www.oeg-upm.net
Email: asun@fi.upm.es
Phone: (34-91) 336-7439
Fax: (34-91) 352-4819