According to the ontology and semantic aspects as defined in the design and specification in WP7 (D50, D38), UoS aims to provide ontology support, generic semantic management and application related semantic knowledge services. This will be implmented in WP8.

And now... Some Services

Below, we briefly introduce these concepts:

Ontology support means the provision of Ontology (in OWL, RDF, protégé format, etc). This includes test ontology and domain ontology. The test ontology is designed for testing and training purposes mainly to test drive and demonstrate generic Semantics Management Services (SMS); the domain ontology are designed and maintained together with potential users (domain experts) of the semantics management services and Semantic Knowledge Service.

The Semantic Management Services (SMS) are services that can be reused in various learning domains to enrich and manipulate content and services semantically. With the purpose of flexibility and adaptability, the SMS are made generic. They can be categorized into the following 3 parts:

1. Ontology management services (OMS) This ONLY manages the domain ontology (DO) resources at the document level. We expect domain ontology itself is well designed and formatted (in OWL) using specialist ontology design tools. The OMS manages the allocation and provision of DOs in the server, similar to functionalities of a DOs registry, such as uploading, identifying and designating DOs for other Semantic Management Services.

2. Semantic annotation services (SAS) By using the DOs designated by OMS, SAS provides a set of functionalities that allow user to generate semantic annotations and bind them to the relevant targets.

3. Semantic Query services (SQS) This mainly generically queries the semantics in the form of triples. The triples can be queried based on subject/predicate/object.

Semantic Knowledge Services (SKS) is domain related at a higher application level. Closer collaboration between the knowledge engineers and domain experts is particular required to effectively define useful knowledge and work out how they can be deduced from the semantics.

We now have initial development and the Ontology support and implementation of the SMS in the form of Web services and would like to identify potential collaborators or users among elegi partners. interested parties pls contact barry at ft@ecs.soton.ac.uk

semantic management service (SMS) workflow and demo

In order to demonstrate its consumption in a Graphical User Interface and facilitate easy reuse as a portal components, we have also developed a set of portlets that interface the Semantic management services. 

Portlets are GUI components in the service form that conforms to the JSR168 specification. They can be aggregate and displayed in a JSR168 compatible portal engine. The portlets components are delivered in WAR files and can be plug&played conveniently in any JSR168 compatible portal solution, such as open-source Liferay portal and Sun Java application server. Below is a set of screen shot of the portlets in design phase and deployed phase.

(design phase in the Sun java portal)

(ontology management portlet deployed in liferay portal engine)

(semantic annotation portlet deployed in liferay portal engine)

(semantic query portlet deployed in liferay portal engine)

part of this is also available in the elegiWiki