RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

Jim Hendler Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:44:05 -0800

Title: RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

Vipul wrote:

Anita,

There are two alternatives for representing ontologies RDF Schema and OWL.

If you plan to use an OWL reasoner then, an OWL based ontology editor should be the right choice.

This can help you:

- track inconsistencies such as concepts are contradictions

- cycles

- equivalent concepts

- re-organizing polyhierarchies

There will be upfront cost however of converting your thesauri into OWL.

Using RDF Schema will be cheaper initially as the mapping of thesauri into RDF Schema can be automated to a large

extent.

in fact, SKOS, a proposed thesaurus standard based in RDF is available (see http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/) and we've done some work with a couple of big thesaurus players (esp Natl Agricultural Library) where a student was able to write some Perl, work with a librarian, and get a good SKOS translation of the thesaurus in a small amount of time. This was a smaller thesaurus than the one you (Anita) describe, but I think it is a good example that this is not rocket science.

I also think the use case for bringing the thesaurus to the Web goes beyond the OWL stuff Vipal describes. Essentially, by moving to RDFS (SKOS) you get an advantage different than reasoning - the terms in your thesaurus become URIs that other people can point to. It means that they can use your terminologies in their applications, and links back to your terms can be maintained (rather than "reverse engineered" by a search engine). Tools people are playing with for SKOS (and OWL) include image annotation, text/blog indexing, and database indexing/linking - and in those cases, the ability to link to things outside the ontology space are crucial (for example, imagine a lot of bloggers in the life science area using your terms as the things they subscribe to via RSS - or imagine being able to link your content to, for example, Nature's, by having mappings between synonyms in each others' thesauri, with live links to the content).

Guus Shreiber and Frank van Harmelen, both local to your area have been playing with OWL for large thesauri (esp. Guus' work with the Getty thesaurus) - you might see if they have demos worth exploring.

hope that helps

Jim H

As far an industrial strength ontology editor and OWL-reasoner such as Construct and Cerebra from Cerebra could be

a good choice.

Cheers,

---Vipul

=======================================

Vipul Kashyap, Ph.D.

Senior Medical Informatician

Clinical Informatics R&D, Partners HealthCare System

Phone: (781)416-9254

Cell: (617)943-7120

http://www.partners.org/cird/AboutUs.asp?cBox=Staff&stAb=vik

To keep up you need the right answers; to get ahead you need the right questions

---John Browning and Spencer Reiss, Wired 6.04.95

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of deWaard, Anita (ELS)
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 6:37 AM
To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Subject: Ontology editor + why RDF?

Dear all,

A quick question that I was hoping this forum might have some thoughts on: we are looking for a new editing tool for our life science thesaurus EMTREE (proprietary, multi-facted polyhierarchical, 260 k terms (50 k preferred, 210 k+ synonyms), > 10,000 nodes) and I am trying to convince the thesaurus department to go to an RDF-based editor. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on

a- the best professional-grade ontology editor to use (serious alternatives to Protege?), and

b- the best arguments to convince my company to start using RDF, both internally and externally.

Thanks for any comments!

Anita

Anita de Waard

Advanced Technology Group, Elsevier

Radarweg 29, 1043 NX Amsterdam

+31 20 485 3838

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

--

Professor James Hendler

Director

Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery 301-405-2696
UMIACS, Univ of Maryland

301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
Web Log: http://www.mindswap.org/blog/author/hendler

RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

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