NeOn Project Lifecycle support for Networked Ontologies Seventh Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop

NeOn Project Lifecycle support for Networked Ontologies

• Seventh Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop

• Bangalore, India

• Gauri Salokhe

• {[e-mail]}

Roadmap

• Background

• NeOn goals and deliverables

• The consortium and work packages

• FAO’s contribution to the project

• Fisheries case study

Background (1/3)

• The growing availability of information has shifted the attention

• 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

• XML DTDs and XML Schemas are sufficient for exchanging data between parties who have previously agreed on definitions
• but...
• semantics are needed to achieve interoperability between numerous, independently developed and managed schemas.

Background (2/3)

• Strategic investment:

• Gartner ranks taxonomies/ontologies 3rd in the list of the top 10 technologies to invest in.

• => The challenge:

• current methodologies and technologies are not adequate to support the whole application development lifecycle for new semantic applications.

Background (3/3)

• From “monolithic” to “networked” ontologies:

• “Semantic applications will rely on a network of contextualized ontologies, exhibiting local but not necessarily global consistency”.

• Ontologies in the Semantic Web will be:

• networked,
• dynamically changing,
• shared by many applications, and
• strongly dependent on the context for which they have been developed or in which they are used.

NeOn goals

• The goals of NeOn are:

• to support the development lifecycle of new generation of semantic applications;

• to create a service-oriented open infrastructure, and associated methodology;

• to extend the state of the art with cost-efficient solutions.

NeOn deliverables

• A generic reference architecture, to provide a framework for integrating ontology lifecycle components.

• The NeOn toolkit, to provide the first instance of a new generation of ontology management tools.

• The NeOn methodology, to provide the necessary framework to organize and manage the development of semantic applications à-la NeOn.

The Consortium (1/2)

• The NeOn project proposal was elaborated by the NeOn Consortium (FAO is a member).

• It was submitted for funding to the European Commission’s 6th Framework, “Information Society Technologies (IST)”.

• The project obtained the best ranking on the Priority 2:

• IST-2004-2.4.7 Semantic-based knowledge and content systems.

• 10 Million Euro were granted by the EC for the 4-year project.

The Consortium (2/2)

• Academic and research:

• Open University, Universitaet Karlsruhe, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of Sheffield, Universitaet Koblenz-Landau;
• Josef Stefan Institute (JSI), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR).

• Small to medium enterprises:

• Intelligent Software Components, S.A; Ontoprise GmbH.

• Large industrial partners:

• Software AG; Atos Origin, s.a.e.

• International or non-profit organizations:

• FAO and Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico (AECE).

Project work packages

FAO’s contribution

• Leads WP7: Ontology-driven fish stock depletion alert system (Case study)

• Participates in WP5: NeOn lifecycle methodology and WP10: Dissemination of NeOn outcomes

• Provides input and feedback to WP1-4 (R&D) and WP6 (infrastructure and tools).

WP7: Case study objectives

• Major goal:

• To increase accessibility and interoperability of fisheries large data & multilingual information sets

• Objectives:

• Create and maintain distributed ontologies in the fisheries domain;

• Implement mechanisms for ontology learning, customized to the fishery domain;

• Use fishery ontology modularization, maintenance and enrichment for a variety of sub-domains;

• Exploit ontologies within web applications; and implement an alert system

WP7: Case study objectives

• Functionalities:

• a search environment,

• user customisation functionality based on user knowledge level,

• user specification of updates (e.g. email notifications),

• alerts based on country or species etc.

WP7: Deliverables & Tasks

Current situation in Fisheries

• Good separation between data, metadata and reference data

• but...

• Systems are very proprietary

• models inhibit exporting data structures
• protocols make it difficult to share data

• Reference Tables Management System is outdated

• poor relationships across thematic domains
• slow
• clunky interface
• difficult to update

Advantages to NeOn for Fisheries

• Replace Reference Tables Management System

• latest technology
• good management interface
• establish relationships across domains
• standardised data model

• Fisheries Ontologies

• modular
• easier to expose reference data to others
• standard protocols
• possibility to interface with other ontologies
• improved query system

Potential data sources

• Possible data sources for Fisheries ontologies

• FIGIS Schemas
• Reference Tables Management System
• ASFA Thesaurus
• Agrovoc
• FAOLEX
• OneFish Topic Hierarchy
• Aquaculture glossary
• Data mining on text corpus and XML files

• Possible data sources for Fisheries Stock Depletion Alert System

• FIDI Statistics
• Statistics from national and regional fishery bodies databases
• Assessments from national and regional fishery bodies
• FIGIS factsheets
• Fishbase
• OneFish
• GlobeFish

Thank you for your attention

• Additional information: http://www.neon-project.org/