NeOn: Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies
Web Service plugin | SPRAT | SARDINE | Change log Management | COAT | TermRaider
NeOn is funded as an Integrated Project under European Commission 6th FP with a budget 10.2 million euros. It starts from March 2006 and runs for 4 years. NeOn is coordinated by Prof. Enrico Motta, The Open University, UK.
The aim of NeOn is to create the first ever service-oriented, open infrastructure, and associated methodology, to support the development life-cycle of such a new generation of semantic applications, with the overall goal of extending the state of the art with economically viable solutions. These applications will rely on a network of contextualized ontologies, exhibiting local but not necessarily global consistency.
Our Role
The University of Sheffield capturing linguistic information for lexicalizations of ontology elements.
Lexical elements evocative of and associated with ontology elements are often sourced from terminological or linguistic resources such as term banks, thesauri and dictionaries. Their linguistic/terminological description contains properties such as part of speech, gender and language.
We have developed an ontology model that captures this information, and is linked to the OWL metamodel.
Furthermore, we have developed several plugins for the NeOn Toolkit, that perform various tasks (see below). Other plugins are in development.
GATE plugins for the NeOn Toolkit
The GATE Webservice plugin for the NeOn toolkit consists of a number of webservices. Each webservice performs a different GATE application.
- SARDINE: ontology population: associating textual metadata with ontology evolution by assimilating textually-derived knowledge from the fisheries domain into a new version of the deployed ontology.
- SPRAT: ontology population: a generic version of the SARDINE tool, which operates on any textual domain and does not require a seed ontology
- TermRaider: a terminology extraction tool
- COAT: collaborative semantic annotation of text with ontologies
More about NeOn
The growing availability of information has shifted the focus from closed, relatively data-poor applications, to mechanisms and applications for searching, integrating and making use of the vast amounts of information that are now available. Ontologies provide the semantic underpinning enabling intelligent access, integration, sharing and use of data and indeed this technology has now become so strategic to companies, that the Gartner market research firm now ranks taxonomies/ontologies third in their list of the top 10 technologies for 2005.
As ontologies are produced in larger numbers and exhibit greater complexity and scale, we now have an opportunity to build a new generation of complex systems, which can make the most of the unprecedented availability of both large volumes of data and large, reusable semantic resources. These systems will provide new functionalities in the emerging semantic web, in the automation of business to business relationships, and also in company intranets.
At the same time, we face a challenge: current methodologies and technologies, inherited from the days of closed, data-poor systems, are simply not adequate to support the whole application development lifecycle for this new class of semantic applications.
NeOn methodologies have been tested across two different sectors -- pharmaceuticals and agriculture/fisheries, whose realistic and large-volume data sets are not manageable using today's technology. NeOn technology is disseminated through business and research events, with special emphasis on building up communities in knowledge-intensive industries and in research.
GATE staff:
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Hamish Cunningham (PI).
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Wim Peters (project manager)
- to provide lifecycle support for a new generation of large-scale semantic applications, by developing appropriate methodologies, tool support and a reference architecture, which will enable interoperability between distributed lifecycle support components
- to provide new methods and technologies for the contextualized construction and use of networked ontologies and associated metadata, for collaborative development and use of semantic applications, for enabling developers to jointly manage evolution of knowledge models and meta-data during their lifecycle, and for improving human-ontology interaction.
- To apply and evaluate the NeOn technology in three case studies addressing two different sectors - pharmaceuticals and agriculture/fisheries, which come with realistic, large-volume data sets and are not easily approachable with today's technology.
- To define methods and tools for developing and reasoning with contextualised networks of ontologies.
- To define methods and tools for improving the human-ontology interaction. NeOn aims to put the needs of users first by ensuring that the HCI expertise existing in the consortium is leveraged into usable technologies, and also by providing cost-effective methods to customize ontologies for users' tasks and individual requirements. By establishing a series of business and research events, NeOn will put special emphasis on building up NeOn communities, both in knowledge-intensive industries and in the research sector.
- Project Web page: http://www.neon-project.org/
- Project Reference: IST-2004-27595
- Project Acronym: NeOn
- Project Name: Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies
- Key Action: IST-4.1.1 New semantic-based & context-aware systems
- Action line: IST-20
04-2.4.7 Semantic-based knowledge and content systems - Total cost: around 14.7 million Euros
- Commission Funding: 10.2 million Euros
- Project Duration: 2006-03-01 to 2010-02-28
Project Objectives
The semantic web of the future will be characterized by a very large number of ontologies; all of them developed with respect to a number of contextual factors, which may reflect the skills of the developers, their application needs, their cultural and social 'biases', and the tools they prefer to use. As the complexity of semantic applications increases, more and more knowledge will be embedded in applications, typically drawn from a wide variety of sources. This new generation of applications will thus reflect the following facts:
- new ontologies are embedded in a network of already existing ontologies;
- ontologies and metadata have to be kept up-to-date with the changing application environments and users' needs.
In this scenario it will become prohibitively expensive to adopt the current approach to semantic integration, where the expectation is to produce a single, globally consistent semantic model, which serves the needs of application developers and fully integrates a number of pre-existing ontologies.
In contrast with the current model, future applications will rely on networks of contextualized ontologies, which are usually locally, but not globally consistent. Application development in this emerging distributed scenario requires a new set of methodologies, tools and techniques, whi
ch can support the efficient development of semantic applications, and are able to exploit networked ontologies, without the need for expensive, global integration effort.
NeOn aims to provide a considerable improvement in the level of support available for ontology engineering by developing both a reference architecture and a concrete toolkit supporting the whole ontology engineering life cycle.
The primary scientific and technological objectives of NeOn are:
In order to achieve the above objectives, a number of other objectives, more technical in nature will also have to be achieved, to provide the necessary techniques and methods required to fulfill the overall objectives of the project. These include:
Funding:
