The SOFA (Simple Ontology Framework API) project

Hi all,

I'd like to let you know about the SOFA (Simple Ontology Framework API)
opensource project, recently started at http://sofa.dev.java.net.

The SOFA (Simple Ontology Framework API) is a Java API for modeling
ontologies with Java language. It integrates ontology engineering tasks
with the Java programming by providing an object model of an abstract,
language-neutral ontology for Semantic Web applications,
Knowledge Bases and other ontology-driven software. The SOFA model does
not rely on any specific ontology language and operates with abstract
ontological concepts rather than with syntactic constructions of a
particular language. Such language-independent approach gives significant
advantages in simplicity and reducing the time/cost of development.
It also allows to use various ontology languages for ontology
representation and provides a mechanism of interoperability between
ontologies described in different language forms.

The SOFA model does not rely on a specific storage either. Many of the
physical storage implementations can be used for storing the SOFA
ontologies. A storage utility is a separate implementation layer and it
can be changed independently from the SOFA interfaces and their
implementations.

The SOFA transparently binds together an application data with the
ontologies. An object of virtually any Java class can participate as
the ontology datatype node. It reveals another promising way of using
the SOFA as an application framework for complex semantic data models. 

Current features:

- The Ontology Object Model interfaces and their implementations including
basic inference mechanism.

- The pluggable ontology storage mechanism independent from physical storage
back-end.

- Support of OWL, DAML+OIL and RDF(S) languages for external representation
(serialization/deserialization) of an ontology model.

- Transparent handling of any Java objects as the ontology datatype nodes.

- Experimental RDBMS ontology storage implementation.

The SOFA API 1.0 alpha version is available in binary and sourcecode form under
the LGPL license. The apidocs are provided as well.

If you are interested in this project, you can subscribe to one of the mailing
lists on the project website (http://sofa.dev.java.net). Anyway, I am ready to
answer your questions.

Thank you.

----
Best regards,
Alex Alishevskikh
alex@viceversa.ru

The SOFA Project administrator.

Received on Thursday, 12 August 2004 14:13:54 UTC