JISC

Start date: 1 April 2007

End date: 31 March 2009

Funding programme: Support for e-Research programme

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

JISC theme(s): e-Research

Committees: JISC Support of Research committee

The project aims to bring to the JISC community a high quality integrated environment for ontology development using the new Web Ontology Language OWL, integrated with alternative frame representations. The project aims to make it easy to develop ontologies and ontology driven software. Existing collaborations are focused on the life sciences, but involvement is welcome from all disciplines from both the research and information environment communities.

The project aims to make it possible to build more effective applications using ontologies. It provides software, training, and support in using ontologies, the new Web Ontology Language OWL, and the Protégé-OWL environment. There is an ongoing series of tutorials at both introductory and advanced levels as well as a range of tutorial material to download.  We also work with groups of users to design ‘clinics’ where particular issues can be addressed in detail. For information on future tutorials or to discuss possible ‘clinics’, see the project website for contact details.

The project is a collaboration between University of Manchester and Stanford University which developed the Protégé environment originally.

Aims and objectives

The project is now entering its second phase. The software developed in the initial phase, Protégé-OWL 3.2, has become the de facto standard editing environment for creating ontologies in OWL with over 15,000 downloads. The user oriented syntax based on the environment has had a major impact in making OWL accessible to general users. The project's written tutorial has become most widely used introduction to OWL. 

This phase aims to broaden the involvement with the community and to update and extend the Protégé environment to keep pace with new developments in OWL and the new OWL 1.1 specification. The first product of this phase, Protege4Alpha is currently available.

Objectives

• Deepen the engagement with existing users and broaden this engagement to new communities through a continuing programme of tutorials, workshops and clinics
• Produce a radically redeveloped user interface that addresses to users' high priority requests
• Develop a new API that supports the new features in OWL 1.1 and highly modularised ontologies
• Support existing collaborators and work in collaboration with OMII towards a long term sustainable framework
• Developing collaborations with the National Centre for E-Social Sciences and the National Centre for Text Mining
• Developing collaborations with UKOLN, MIMAS and the British Library to foster common approaches to annotation, discovery and use of e-resources
• Develop collaborations with the library and information environment communities

Project methodology

The project uses a methodology combining iterative development of software and rapid feedback from users in tutorials and workshops.  In this phase, NCESS will collaborate in the process of understanding users, their needs, and responses to the interface.

The project will be divided into the following workpackages:

• User requirements and evaluation integrated with the tutorial and development programme and conducted in collaboration with the National Centre for E-Social Science.  Researchers from NCESS regularly participate in the tutorials
• Tutorials, workshops and clinics
• Development of the Protégé-OWL environment infrastructure The revised Protege4 alpha is currently available from the project website. It is being developed both in collaboration with Stanford and with the broad OWL implementation community.  Many of the features are aimed directly at making it easy for other open source developers to build on the platform
• Development of collaborative tools based on the new software and including tools to move naturally from informal to formal representations
• Coordination with OMII and the ^myGrid team to develop tools for managing and annotating web services and grid middleware

Anticipated impact

Ontologies and metadata are central to e-Science and Knowledge Services. The project will extend the use of ontologies and common standards within the JISC community and provide the tools to make them easier to develop and use.