A prerequisite to the success of the Semantic Web are shared ontologies which enable the seamless exchange of information between different parties.

Abstract Driven by application requirements and using well-understood theoretical results, we describe a novel methodology and a tool for modular ontology design. We support the user in the safe use of imported symbols and in the economic import of the relevant part of the imported ontology. Both features are supported in a well-understood way: safety guarantees that the semantics of imported concepts is not changed, and economic import guarantees that no difference can be observed between importing the whole ontology and importing the relevant part. 1

A common perception is that there are two competing visions for the future evolution of the Web: the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. A closer look, though, reveals that the core technologies and concerns of these two approaches are complementary and that each field can and must draw from the other’s strengths. We believe that future web applications will retain the Web 2.0 focus on community and usability, while drawing on Semantic Web infrastructure to facilitate mashup-like information sharing. However, there are several open issues that must be addressed before such applications can become commonplace. In this paper, we outline a semantic weblogs scenario that illustrates the potential for combining Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, while highlighting the unresolved issues that impede its realization. Nevertheless, we believe that the scenario can be realized in the short-term. We point to recent progress made in resolving each of the issues as well as future research directions for each of the communities.

Abstract: Establishing electronically accessible repositories of people’s capabilities, experiences, and key knowledge areas is key in setting up Enterprise Knowledge Management. A skills repository can be used for e.g. finding people, staffing, skills gap analysis, and professional development. The ontology based skills management system developed at Swiss Life uses RDF schema for storing ontologies. Its query interface is based on a combined RQL and HTML query engine.

Abstract. In software engineering, the notion of unit testing was successfully introduced and applied. Unit tests are easy manageable tests for small parts of a program – single units. They proved especially useful to capture unwanted changes and side effects during the maintenance of a program, and they grow with the evolution of the program. Ontologies behave quite differently than program units. As there is no information hiding in ontology engineering, and thus no black box components, at first the idea of unit testing for ontologies seems not applicable. In this paper we motivate the need for unit testing, describe the adaptation to the unit testing approach, and give use cases and examples. 1

www.disi.unige.it This paper aims at presenting the development phase of a novel ontology for modeling the knowledge underlying the pipeline of acquisition and reconstruction processes for shapes. We explain the urge to develop an ontology in this domain in a typical e-science scenario taking into account the approach and the technologies suggested by the current Semantic Web initiatives. We present the domain of our ontology, its possible applications and a list of informal desiderata, which eventually lead to the constitution of precise competency questions. Furthermore, a list of fundamental concepts for the acquisition and reconstruction pipeline are carried out. Finally, we present sketches of the ontology and the future work that should be done according to the users’ needs.

A common perception is that there are two competing visions for the future evolution of the Web: the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. A closer look, though, reveals that the core technologies and concerns of these two approaches are complementary and that each field can and must draw from the other’s strengths. We believe that future web applications will retain the Web 2.0 focus on community and usability, while drawing on Semantic Web infrastructure to facilitate mashup-like information sharing. However, there are several open issues that must be addressed before such applications can become commonplace. In this paper, we outline a semantic weblogs scenario that illustrates the potential for combining Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, while highlighting the unresolved issues that impede its realization. Nevertheless, we believe that the scenario can be realized in the short-term. We point to recent progress made in resolving each of the issues as well as future research directions for each of the communities.

Abstract. Ontologies have been widely accepted as the primary method of representing knowledge in the Semantic Web. Knowledge Elicitation (KE) is usually one of the first steps in building ontologies. A number of ontology editors such as Protégé have been developed to assist users in building ontologies efficiently. However, traditional KE techniques, such as card sorting and laddering, are not yet supported, but performed manually and outside of such tools. In this paper we present a methodology and a corresponding plug-in for Protégé that allows graphical ellicitation knowledge from documents using card sorting and laddering approaches. Our aim is to seamlessly integrate the KE techniques into the ontology building process to make ontology building more efficient and less error-prone. As a side-effect the persistent storage of card sorting and laddering results allows for later traceability of ontology development. KE largely depends on user interaction with the plug-in, therefore we employed user-centred design principles to capture requirements. After implementation, the plug-in was evaluated thoroughly against the requirements. The evaluation shows that this KE plug-in meets many of the user’s expectations and indeed saves them considerable time when building ontologies. 1

Abstract. Knowledge related to Shape Modelling is multi-faceted because of the complexity and heterogeneity of the involved resources and because different applications may cast different semantics on them. A fast evolution of the field is now conditioned by how research teams will be able to communicate and share resources and knowledge. The field needs to be formalized in order to achieve a shared conceptualization accessible by the whole scientific community and eventually to ensure an actual exploitation of its knowledge within the Semantic Web. In this context, the main objective of the Network of Excellence

Deliverable D3.1.2 (WP3.1) In this deliverable addresses we present the evaluation of our work performed in the task `T3.1 Incremental Ontology Evolution'. There are two aspects to this evaluation: First, we introduce the notion of ontology evaluation into our framework of incremental ontology evolution. Second, we present evaluation results of our methods in terms of effectiveness, performance and applicability.