An emerging approach to knowledge acquisition is to collect statements from volunteer contributors over the Web. In this approach, the design of the acquisition interface is key to focusing on statements of interest, avoiding spurious entries, retaining the contributors, etc. Several such volunteer-contribution-based systems have been deployed to date, each with its own idiosyncratic interface. This paper discusses some key challenges faced by volunteer collection interfaces, and outlines the design features that we have found effective in addressing some aspects of those challenges. The paper discusses how these features have been implemented in deployed collection systems, and reflects on the data collected to extract lessons for future work in this research area.

Abstract. OntoTrack is a new browsing and editing “in-one-view ” ontology authoring tool. It combines a sophisticated graphical layout with mouse enabled editing features optimized for efficient navigation and manipulation of large ontologies. The system is based on SpaceTree [PGB02] and implemented in Java2D. OntoTrack provides animated expansion and de-expansion of class descendants, zooming, paning and uses elaborated layout techniques like click-able miniature branches or selective detail views. At the same time OntoTrack allows for quite a number of editing features using mouse-over anchor buttons and graphical selections without switching into a special editing layout. In addition, every single editing step is synchronized with an external reasoner in order to provide instant feedback about relevant modeling consequences. 1

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Abstract — In Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), the aim is to use an ontology to mediate the access to data sources. We present a plug-in for the standard ontology editor Protégé that allows users to model ontologies with mappings to data sources in order to perform OBDA. We argue that our plug-in, together with an OBDA-Enabled reasoner, allows users to build, test, and deploy OBDA Systems in academic or industrial settings. I.

Abstract. The vision of a mobile Web in which the computing environment will be composed of various devices that are carried by different users as they go through their daily routine might soon become a reality. In this context, Web services and the Semantic Web are already recognized as important building blocks. On the other hand, so far only little work has been done to support the discovery and selection of semantically enriched Web services on mobile terminals. In this paper we present a graphical toolbox for preference-based service discovery on tiny mobile devices. Our prototypical toolbox is developed as an extension of the Protégé OWL plugin and consists of a component called MOBIONT responsible for service matchmaking and preference relaxation together with an emulator for different mobile devices called MOBIXPL. Our work aims to serve as an open platform in order to gain experiences with different discovery strategies as well as mobile end-user interfaces. 1

Abstract. The design of comprehensive ontologies is a serious challenge. Therefore, it is necessary to support the ontology designer by providing him with design methodologies, ontology editors, and automated reasoning tools that explicate the consequences of his design decisions. Currently, reasoning tools are largely limited to the reasoning services (i) computing the subsumption hierarchy of the classes in an ontology and (ii) determining the consistency of these classes. In this paper, we survey the most important tasks that arise in ontology design and discuss how they can be supported by automated reasoning tools. In particular, we show that it is beneficial to go beyond the usual reasoning services (i) and (ii). 1

Syndromic surveillance requires the acquisition and analysis of data that may be suggestive of early epidemics in a community, long before there is categorical evidence of unusual infection. These data are often heterogenous and noisy, and need to be interpreted by a combination of analytic methods. Syndromic surveillance thus involves problems of integrating data, of configuring problem-solving strategies, and of mapping integrated data to appropriate methods. These tasks have been studied in the knowledge-based systems community for many years. We present a software architecture that suppports knoweldge-based data integration and problem solving, thereby facilitating many aspects of syndromic surveillance. Central to our approach, a set of reference ontologies supports semantic integration and a parallelizable blackboard architecture implements invocation of appropriate problem-solving methods and control of reasoning. We demonstrate our approach with BioSTORM — an experimental system that offers an end-to-end solution to syndromic surveillance.

CO-Protégé is a set of plugins that extends Protégé-2000 in order to support a collaborative developing of an ontology. In Co-Protégé people do not make a direct edition of the shared ontology, but also they change it through the publication of ontological artifact. Co-Protégé users manage simultaneously two ontologies the private ontology and the shared one. Private ontology

Orient is a project to develop an ontology engineering tool that integrates into existing industry tooling environments -- the Eclipse platform and the WebSphere Studio developing tools family. This paper describes how two important issues are addressed during the project, namely tool integration and scalability. We show how Orient morphs into the Eclipse platform and achieves UI and data level integration with the Eclipse platform and other modelling tools. We also describe how we implemented a scalable RDF(S) storage, query, manipulation and inference mechanism on top of a relational database. In particular, we report the empirical performance of our RDF(S) closure inference algorithm on a DB2 database.

Several problems are involved in the Virtual Enterprise (VE) formation process. One of the most important problems is the lack of understanding that may arise during agents ’ interaction, due to both the structural and semantic concepts representation heterogeneity. In the VE life cycle identification of needs, for example, it is necessary to describe the needed product or service in a way that it can be understood by all the participants. The easier way of solving this problem is to use either a common ontology or a shared one which may be understood by all the enterprise delegate agents participating in the process. However, each agent may have one of the existing different ontologies and a shared ontology will not be universal. Thus, the enterprises will not waste time converting all the content of their ontology if the new one is not considered a universal one. Due to these facts we have created an Ontology-based Service Agent which finds correspondence (similarity) between the concepts (products) of two ontologies through their respective concept’s names, characteristics, relations and concept’s descriptions. 1.