Monday, June 25, 2007

A true semantic web application

OntologyOnline.org was launched in April 2007. It offers one of the first true semantic web applications (often referenced as web 3.0) by allowing users to interact with ontologies at runtime. Ontology Online's proper search engine crawls the available ontologies for exact phrases, but also synonyms and even word fragments, the querying ability is only limited by the content itself, not by the semantics.

As an example illustrating this, when searching organisms with the OntologyOnline search engine the search parameters 'velvet worm', 'spitting worm', 'onychophoran', or even the word fragment 'onyocho' will all lead to the same page describing the Onychophora(e.g. velvet worms) phylum.

The search engine is also accessible by means of a Google Gadget.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

All about OWL - RDF tags.

We have started adding OWL - RDF element tag descriptions and definitions to the Ontology Directory Project at Ontology Online. You might have seen that the official W3C documentation on OWL tends to be quite verbose, with the Ontology Directory Project we wish to provide a focused, comprehensive and quickly accessible description of the OWL language.
The benefits of this projects are that by offering documentation in the form of an ontology you can deliver indepth information without having to resort to lengthy text-descriptions which repeat a lot of the same information.

For an example see owl:class definition, where the hierarchy around this concept and the horizontal relations attributed to this concept provide a level of detail you would only be able to express textually by writing several paragraphs of information.