Re: (SeWeb) KAON - KArlsruhe ONtology and Semantic Web Infrastructure

On the framework of the IST european project Ontoweb,
I'm chairing SIG3 about Enterprise-standard ontology environments.
Information about SIG3 can be found at
http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/ontoweb/sig-tools/
 We also have two mailing lists:
  suscribe: ontoweb-sigtools-request@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es
  send comments: ontoweb-sigtools@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es

During the last year we have been working on ontoweb and also on that SIG
on the following issues:

.- STate of the art and  Comparison study of different kind of ontology
tools. The study includes
11 ontology editors, 6 ontology-based annotation tools, 4 ontology merging
tools,
4 ontology evaluation tools and 14 RDF-based tools.
Tools in the same group were analysed and compared using the same
criteria.
Each tool developer provided us all the information gathered on that
document.
The results of this study is Deliverable 1.3 about ontology tools, which
is available at
http://www.ontoweb.org

.-  Benchmarking of diferent kind of ontology tools.
Since this is a complex task, we decided to be focussed on ontology
building tools.
Our goal in SIG3  is to test  several dimensions:
  *  expresivity of the knowledge model,
  * intereoperability between tools on the same group and between tools
that belong to different groups,
  * exchange ontologies
  * quality of the translations generated by the tools.
  * navigation with huge ontologies
  * learnability and  usability of the tool,
   * scalability when there exist thousends of instances.
  * inference mechanisms,
   * ....

We also know that the goal is NOT to rank the tools involved on the
experiments.

The work done until know (and it is not finished yet)  is  related with
the expressivity.
SIG3 participants have done a toy example on the travelling domain. The
ontology was implemented with different kinds
 of ontology building tools:
   **  DL tools (  Loom, OILEd,  OpenKnoME)
   ** Frame-based + FOL tools ( OntoEdit,    Protégé2000,  WebODE)
   **  NL analysis tools   (Terminae )
   ** and also with  DOE: Differential Ontology Editor and  SemTalk

The contributions and results of that the experiment
can be found at: http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/eon2002/

We presented the results last week, when we met at the OntoWeb SIG3
workshop on "Evaluation of Ontology based tools".

Our next meeting will be on the OntoWeb4 meeting in 16-17 December 2002 in
Insbruck.
There, we will conclude the experiment done and we will also design new
experiments related with tool's interoperability, quality of the
export/import facilities, ontology exchange  and scalability.

At our next experiment (it will be available soon), we will propose to
import an ontology in RDF(S). Then, we will modify the ontology using the
tools and we will generate again RDF(S). The code generated by a given
tool will be imported by other tools. Then, we could analyse:
.- quality of the RDF(S) translators
.- compatibility between knowledge models of different tools.
.- to identify what kind of knowledge is loss when we exchange ontologies
between tools that have different expresivity.

You are wellcome to participate on SIG3 activities.


Asuncion Gomez-Perez
Ontoweb Sig3 Chair.





"John F. Sowa" wrote:

> I looked at the KAON web site and some of the material there,
> and I am happy that it is an open-source project based on Java.
> But I had a question about why KAON is independent from other
> open-source, Java-based projects for ontology editing and
> development.
>
> I don't want to start an argument about why one system might be
> better or worse than another, especially since I am not at the
> moment using any of them.  But since I am working with ontologies,
> I would like to consider using some such system and/or recommending
> it to my colleagues.  I would like to know why there are so many
> systems available that are being developed independently by different
> groups.
>
> For example, the Protege project at Stanford is also an open-source
> Java-based ontology editor and development platform:
>
>     http://protege.stanford.edu/index.html
>
> I have also looked at that system, but I have not used it either.
> But it is also available as an open-source project, and I have seen
> demos and examples of other development platforms that are being
> developed on top of various platforms, including Java.
>
> Why are all these groups working on independent tools for ontology
> instead of collaborating to build common tools that everyone could
> use?
>
> John Sowa
>
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