Re: Ontology browsing

Some good points here. One comment, making a vocabulary human accessible 
takes more than text description and indexing there is also a question 
of what the hierachical naviagation structure looks like.

I've just listened to some discussions on the Gene Ontology which 
pointed out that the Gene Ontology is designed to be navigatable by 
domain practitioners and that this is an important factor in its 
usability. In contrast ontologies designed to be formal, deep and 
accurate models of a domain tend to be very hard to navigate even for 
experts. There seems to be some idea that one could take a deep ontology 
and overlay on it a more thesaurus-like navigation structure to simplify 
navigation in use. Sounds interesting.

Dave

Butler, Mark wrote:

> Hi Karun
> 
> 
>>Also, speaking of versioning, I have been wanting to develop 
>>an ontology
>>server that you can ask for an ontology with a particular version, and
>>it ships you the XML representation of the ontology.  I'm not sure how
>>this fits into your plans, but just thought I'd throw it out to see if
>>you have thought of it or if there exists a standard protocol 
>>for it.  I
>>have not mentioned it to Prof. Karger yet, but I think we will/should
>>need it soon.
> 
> 
> I think there are lots of useful enhancements that ontology servers can
> offer. John Gilbert, a summer intern who was working at me was looking at
> this. I'll try to outline our thinking here: 
> 
> 1. When communities develop new schemas, it would be preferable for them to
> adopt schema re-use rather than schema creation where possible as this
> simplifies interoperability. When a community re-uses a schema in this way
> it is commonly known as an application profile. 
> 
> (An aside: for relevant background, see the MEG and CORES work:
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/
> http://www.cores-eu.net
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/scart/
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/
> Although the MEG project is finished, there is a Sourceforge project
> involving the same developers - it hasn't released any files yet, but they
> do have code in the CVS
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/schemas)
> 
> 2. In order to facilitate schema re-use, schema authors need two types of
> information
> i) english descriptions that ground the formal terms used in the schema.
> Such descriptions are not expressable in a machine readable format.
> ii) relationships between the formal terms e.g. property and class
> definitions, relationship hierarchies etc. 
> 
> 3. Therefore we hypothesise that schemas should contain human readable
> descriptions as well as machine readable information wherever possible.
> 
> 4. Re-use requires effective searching of the schemas, but different search
> techniques are appropriate for the human and machine readable sections. John
> G proposed adding additional metadata to the schema (metametametadata) about
> grounding. However I'm concious that adding metadata has a cost, and getting
> schema authors to add information so elements of their schemas are re-used
> may be difficult - I'd prefer to see them concentrate on getting their
> schemas right. Therefore we propose faceted browsing and hyperlinking of
> related terms are useful search mechanisms for exploring the machine
> readable sections, whereas free text search is appropriate for the human
> readable sections. It is fairly easy to construct a hybrid architecture that
> supports this by combining an RDF store like Jena and a text indexing system
> like Lucene - see slide 7 of
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-dspace/2003Sep/att-0055/sw_tool_
> investigation.pdf
> 
> 5. John did some work on a demonstration of this hybrid architecture - for
> screen shots see 
> slides 8 and 9 in the above presentation. 
> 
> I'd like to make this demo available, its on the to-do list, it's just due
> to the way the OntologyDocumentManager works in Jena 2 it's quite hard to
> make it work in a portable way on J2EE application servers. After some
> discussion with Ian Dickinson who is responsible for this code in Jena, I've
> concluded the best way to resolve this is to write a custom OntologyManager,
> but I haven't had time to do this yet. 
> 
> Dr Mark H. Butler
> Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
> mark-h_butler@hp.com
> Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2003 10:08:20 UTC