The presentation introduces
the LOBO intelligent ontology management tool prototype, and gives a brief
overview of its application domains.
Ontologies are used more and
more in building up to date information systems. An ontology codifies the
explicit body of knowledge in a specific domain and describes the intrinsic
relationships within it. Ontologies are especially important for intelligent Web
search engines as they help to build the “Semantic Web”, where information is
not only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. Ontologies can also
play a significant role in accessing conventional information-sources in a more
efficient and user-friendly way.
The ontology management tool
presented here builds on the results of the SILK Framework 5 EU-project. The
SILK (System Integration via Logic and Knowledge, IST-1999-11135) project was
co-ordinated by IQSOFT Ltd. and was carried out in co-operation with French,
Romanian, and Greek partners. The three-year research and development work was
successfully concluded in October 2002. The main result of the project is the
SILK tool-set which supports the integration of heterogeneous information sources.
SILK uses the object-oriented paradigm and its languages, such as UML and OCL,
and its implementation is based on constraint and logic programming. In
addition to conventional relational and object-oriented databases, SILK
supports access and integration of XML and RDF based information sources, as
well as SOAP based Web services.
The LOBO (LOgic Based Ontology
management, IKTA-00126/2002) project builds on the base technology provided by
the SILK tool-set, and extends it towards ontology integration. The biomedical
domain, selected as the pilot application, is an extremely important part of
the LOBO project. This domain plays a significant role today, because following
the rapid development of the 90's, the biological medicine (and the related fields
of molecular biology, genetic engineering etc.) produces an exponentially
increasing volume of biological data and makes it available on the Internet.
However it becomes more and more problematic to find and use the relevant data
available in this information “jungle”.
In the presentation we
introduce the first prototype of the LOBO system which supports the intelligent
use of RDF based data sources. We have chosen RDF for this exploratory phase,
as it is the base language of the Semantic Web approach, and thus a large
amount of information is available in this format. The prototype provides tools for querying, comparison and
consistency checking of ontologies written as RDF schemas. Through schemas, the
LOBO system may be able to answer queries, which would have been impossible to
answer using the traditional approach. Furthermore, the prototype supports the
integration of the ontologies written as RDF schemas, so it can partly automate
the building of unified ontologies. Thanks to the SILK background, it is
possible to link RDF schemas with the meta-information extracted from other
kind of data sources, such as relational, OO, etc. sources. Based on this, we
can create a unified ontology, which describes both RDF and relational
databases simultaneously and thus provides access to the underlying data
through in a homogeneous way.