AIC Seminar Series

The study of ontologies and their use is no longer just one of the topics in the Artificial Intelligence literature. Ontologies are now ubiquitous in many information-systems enterprises: they constitute the backbone for the Semantic Web, they are used in e- commerce, and in various application fields such as bioinformatics and medicine. As a result, developers are designing a large number of ontologies using different tools and different languages. These ontologies cover unrelated or overlapping domains, at different levels of detail and granularity. Such wide-spread use of ontologies inevitably produces an ontology-management problem: the need to find and compare existing ontologies, to merge them together, to reuse complete ontologies or their parts, to maintain and compare different versions, and to create custom-tailored views of ontologies.

In this talk, I will describe our algorithms and tools for performing these ontology-management tasks. This suite of tools, which we developed as a component of the Protege ontology- development environment, partially automates many of the tasks, requiring only minimal input and feedback from users. I will discuss how we can make ontology development and maintenance easier and more accessible to users outside Artificial Intelligence labs. Such uptake is essential for the use of knowledge-based systems on a wide scale.