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| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/S44686/01 |
| Title: |
HyOntUse: Hybrid User Oriented to Ontology Tools |
| Principal Investigator: |
Professor A Rector |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Researcher Co-investigator: |
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| Project Partner: |
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| Department: |
Computer Science |
| Organisation: |
The University of Manchester |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research |
| Starts: |
01 October 2003 |
Ends: |
31 March 2007 |
Value (£): |
303,929
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Information and Knowledge Management |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
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| Related Grants: |
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| Panel History: |
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Summary |
Metadata and ontologies are widely identified as key technologies for E-Science. However, the ontologies for each domain need to be developed and 'owned' by the experts in that domain. Although they provide greatly increased power, domain experts often find logic based languages such as OWL (formerly DAML+OIL) unintuitive and difficult to use. We address two parts of this problem a) Presenting the ontology in ways which domain users t easy to understand, develop, and maintain; and b) providing tools to help them understand when the inferences provided by the logic engine do not their expectations - i.e. to debug the ontology. No complete formal solution is known for either problem at this time for the tableaux reasoners which underpin OWL. Therefore we propose a heuristic approach.
(Note: This is one of a pair of projects under this initiative. The other, CO-ODE, submitted to JISC seeks to provide and evaluate a user-oriented plug- and-play environment combining OilEd with Stanford's Proteg6.environment).
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| Final Report Summary |
HyOntUse is one of a programme of projects aimed at making the new Web Ontology Language, OWL, useful and usable for general scientists and engineers. The main outcome of the project is the development of the de facto standard OWL environment for use by domain scientists, Protg-OWL, which includes support for modularisation, debugging, and an easy to understand user interface.
"Ontologies" - formal representations of the concepts needed to describe a field - and "meta-data" - descriptions of resources in those fields using those concepts - are key technologies for E-Science. They provide the means to describe data, information, and services, so that they can be found and used by other software as well as by human users. At the beginning of the project the standard for the new Web Ontology Language (OWL 1.0) had just been released. OWL is based on a special family of logics - "description logics" - which gives it more power and rigour than previous ontology languages and makes it possible to use powerful software "reasoners" to reorganise and check OWL ontologies. However, most working scientists find the underlying logic difficult. They often find it hard to locate the source of errors and unexpected results - i.e. to "debug" the ontology. They find the standard syntaxes unfamiliar and opaque. They find it difficult to break OWL ontologies down into manageable segments, because the information in ontologies is much more highly interconnected than in traditional databases. That scientists find OWL difficult is a serious problem, because successful large ontologies are usually built and "owned" by the scientific community that uses them.
With its sister project, CO-ODE, HyOntUse has provided tools to address these issues. It has delivered tutorials and workshops with the combined aim of helping users to understand OWL and helping developers of OWL tools to understand their users. It has also contributed to the specification of OWL 1.1, which is designed specifically to respond to requests from users of the original OWL 1.0 standard.
The tools are embedded in the Protg-OWL environment and are designed a) to help debug ontologies, b) to break them down into understandable modules, c) to simplify the syntax, d) to support common patterns and allow the user interface to be extended to support new patterns as they arise, and e) transform ontologies in more familiar formats to and from OWL. It the process, the project has delivered the first editor for the new OWL 1.1 language, given rise to important industrial collaborations, and has contributed to numerous other research projects in the biomedical, environmental and physical sciences both in the UK and internationally.
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.man.ac.uk |
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