ANN: pOWL - ontology editing and management solution in PHP

Despite the semantic web targets being an "extension of the current web" 
we experienced a lack of applications and tools for the most widespread 
web development technology - namely PHP. Since the beginning of this 
year we thus started to develop an integrated ontology editing and 
management solution using this technology with name "pOWL". It covers 
database model storage, layered RDF-S/OWL APIs (for convenient access by 
PHP programmers) and a web based user interface for collaborative 
ontology development.

We now reached Beta quality stage where feedback about existing 
insufficiencies, missing features and future development directions is 
desirable.
On the other hand pOWL is already productively used in serveral 
projects, it was downloaded about 400 times so far and the seven 
development team members release enhanced versions every 6-8 weeks.
Version 0.71 was just published and may be downloaded from the 
SourceForge project page: http://sf.net/projects/powl .
Further information about pOWL is to be found at:

          http://powl.sourceforge.net

Features include:

    * Support for viewing, editing of RDFS/OWL ontologies of arbitrary size.
    * Sophisticated widgets for data editing.
    * Questioning the knowledge base with RDQL (query builder) or 
full-text search.
    * pOWL is extensible via it's plug-in concept.
    * Object oriented API for accessing RDF-S and OWL.
    * Versioning. All edits of a knowledge base may be logged and rolled 
back.
    * Scalability. Models are stored in database tables and only those 
parts of the model are loaded into main memory which are actually needed.
    * Multi language support.
    * Easy deployment.

pOWL is released under GNU Public Licence (GPL).

Sören Auer
on behalf of  the pOWL development team


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Sören Auer - University of Leipzig - Dept. of Computer Science
Room 5-52, Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig, +49 (341) 97-32323

Received on Sunday, 26 September 2004 14:33:29 UTC