ORES - A Workshop on Ontology Repositories
I have just sent around the first CFP for a workshop collocated with ESWC 2010 (and so located in a very nice part of the world...) about ontology repositories and editors for the Semantic Web (see the ORES 2010 website). There are so many interesting issues to be discussed in this area that I am surprised it is the first of the sort.
One of the most important of these issues concerns the interoperability and federation of ontology repositories, reflecting the many discussions we already had with people from the Open Ontology Repository initiative, the NCBO BioPortal, and many others. It is nice to see all these people getting involved in this event.
Another aspect quite important to me concerns the role of ontology repositories in the ontology lifecycle, including integrations with ontology editors (c.f. the Watson plugin), ontology modularization, ontology versioning (c.f. IWOD), ontology metadata, collaboration, etc.
In sum, this promises to be a quite exciting event with many connections to broader projects. If you want to be part of it, here are the dates to put in your calendar: Deadline for paper submissions - 1st March 2010, workshop - 30th or 31st May 2010.
A couple of papers accepted recently
I didn't have much time lately to update this blog with the latest news, but we recently had a few submissions accepted that are related to Watson and are worth mentioning here already.
At K-CAP 2009, on agreement and disagreement in ontologies: This is one I really like, mainly because I wrote it, but also because this is something I wanted to work on for quite some times, and I think the result is really interesting. Basically, the paper describes measures of agreement and disagreement of an ontology with a statement (e.g. Person subClassOf Human). The measures provide more than just a yes/no test like a coherence check would do, but provide granular measures of both agreement and disagreement. No point going into the details here (read the paper!), but the part I really find nice is that is it leads to the possibility to measure consensus and controversy on statements in a collection of ontologies (and I am talking about Watson here!) Experiments detailed in the paper show really interesting possibilities with this. Also, it is fascinating to look at agreements and disagreements between ontologies in a particular domain, to see that different "camps" exist, with groups of agreeing ontologies commonly disagreeing with other groups of ontologies.
We also, got a demo of Cupboard accepted at K-CAP 09: submitted with the guys from INRIA and Karlsruhe. Cupboard is going really well with more and more users joining. If you are around at K-CAP, come talk to us at the demo session!
A paper on the ontology of relations between ontologies at KEOD 2009: As part of Carlo's PhD, he needed an ontology to formalize and reason upon relations between ontologies (inclusion, version, compatibility, etc.) This paper describes the design of this ontology (called DOOR, descriptive ontology of ontology relations). This is actually a quite complicated design, but also a quite exciting outcome as the ontology is going to be at the basis of Carlo's system (Kannel) for detecting and managing relations between ontologies in large ontology repositories (talking about Watson again here).
First public demo of Cupboard
An ontology hosting system
Yesterday at ESWC 2009, I made the first public demo of Cupboard and, to be honest, I am myself quite amazed by the positive feedback I received.
Basically, Cupboard is an ontology hosting system. Now, that could mean anything so I tend to present it according to three different aspects/scenarios/user groups:
- I am an ontology developer. I build ontologies for particular reasons, but still I want to make them available, to share them, to discuss them, to describe them.
- I am an ontology user. I want to be able to find ontologies when I need them. I also want to know whether this ontology is good or not, where it comes from, what it looks like.
- I am an ontology application developers. I need an infrastructure to explore ontologies, query them, exchange them and exploit them.
So basically, what you have as a user of Cupboard is an `ontology space' (see Enrico's space, which is not really Enrico's, but our test ontology space). This is an online space where you can upload ontologies, describe metadata about them and add alignments between them. Now, we also provide sophisticated searching mechanisms to find ontologies in other ontology spaces and review mechanisms to assess the ontologies according to 5 different dimensions (reusability, coverage, complexity, modeling and correctness). Finally, each ontology space acts as a virtual ontology infrastructure. Through the API we provide (not really available now, but soon I promise), one can build applications that rely on locating, exploring and exploiting ontologies on Cupboard without needing any additional ontology processing software locally.
I cannot really report on all the comments and questions I had during the presentation and the demo. Many of them were about technical elements (e.g. "how do you compute these visualizations?") but also, very often, on the availability of Cupboard ("Can I get an account?", "Is there an open source version I can install on the intranet of my company?"). The answers to these are: we are in beta-testing now, so drop me an e-mail if you are interested, and yes, we plan to realize the whole Cupboard server as an open source package. Next thing would be to inter-connect all the different instances of Cupboard...