JISC

Start date: 1 April 2003

End date: 31 March 2005

Funding programme: Support for e-Research programme

Project website: http://www.co-ode.org/

JISC theme(s): e-Research

The CO-ODE project aims to integrate the most widely used tools for developing and using ontologies worldwide - OilEd from the UK and Protégé from Stanford in the US - in order to create an integrated open-source toolset. The toolset will be a user-orientated package to satisfy the needs of four use cases:

• Developing and maintaining large ontologies;
• Creating small local ontologies;
• Extending existing ontologies for specific uses;
• Using ontologies to develop applications.

The project is led by the University of Manchester, with partners at Southampton Universty and Stanford University.  

Aims and Objectives  

• Provide the next steps towards a user-oriented, scalable environment for domain expert to acquire, develop and use ontologies as part of the open-source infrastructure for the e-science and and semantic web / grid communities.
• Redevelop industrial strength services for ontology development based on the proven successes of the de facto editing environments for logic and frame based ontologies respectively, OilEd and Protégé.
• Integrate these servies in a single platform linking three paradigms - frames, description logics, and RDF(S) - taking advantage of the existing plug-and-play facilities of Protégé to give access to a wide range of further open-source tools.
• Bring together well established user communities based around the two sets of tools into a single framework that can link other developments in the UK and Europe, notably those being developed in the AKT IRC.
• Ensure that all tools are developed in co-operation with practical users.
• To facilitate transatlantic co-operation on the development of ontologies and e-science and to take advantage of an unusual opportunity for parallel development which takes maximum advantage of the complementary skills in the UK and US. 

The project toolset will support all three common paradigms: Frames, RDF(S) and the new Ontology Web Language (OWL). 

Project Methodology  

The project will be divided into the following workpackages:

• User Requirements and Evaluation:including a survey of existing tools, consultation with commercial collaborators, and a workshop / tutorial.  The team will make use of existing requirements analyses gathered for Protégé and OilEd.
• Coordination with Stanford: joint meetings with the Stanford Protégé team will be supplemented by access grid and phone conferences to maintain co-ordination. 
• Re-engineering of OilEd.
• Development of the user interface and 'tabs' (plug-ins) for Protégé.

Deliverables  

The main deliverable for the project will be the ontology toolset to support the e-science and semantic web / grid communities.  This will be supported by a requirements analysis and ongoing monitoring mechanisms, full documentation and training for the toolset design, and dissemination workshops and tutorials.