First public demo of Cupboard
An ontology hosting system
Yesterday at ESWC 2009, I made the first public demo of Cupboard and, to be honest, I am myself quite amazed by the positive feedback I received.
Basically, Cupboard is an ontology hosting system. Now, that could mean anything so I tend to present it according to three different aspects/scenarios/user groups:
- I am an ontology developer. I build ontologies for particular reasons, but still I want to make them available, to share them, to discuss them, to describe them.
- I am an ontology user. I want to be able to find ontologies when I need them. I also want to know whether this ontology is good or not, where it comes from, what it looks like.
- I am an ontology application developers. I need an infrastructure to explore ontologies, query them, exchange them and exploit them.
So basically, what you have as a user of Cupboard is an `ontology space' (see Enrico's space, which is not really Enrico's, but our test ontology space). This is an online space where you can upload ontologies, describe metadata about them and add alignments between them. Now, we also provide sophisticated searching mechanisms to find ontologies in other ontology spaces and review mechanisms to assess the ontologies according to 5 different dimensions (reusability, coverage, complexity, modeling and correctness). Finally, each ontology space acts as a virtual ontology infrastructure. Through the API we provide (not really available now, but soon I promise), one can build applications that rely on locating, exploring and exploiting ontologies on Cupboard without needing any additional ontology processing software locally.
I cannot really report on all the comments and questions I had during the presentation and the demo. Many of them were about technical elements (e.g. "how do you compute these visualizations?") but also, very often, on the availability of Cupboard ("Can I get an account?", "Is there an open source version I can install on the intranet of my company?"). The answers to these are: we are in beta-testing now, so drop me an e-mail if you are interested, and yes, we plan to realize the whole Cupboard server as an open source package. Next thing would be to inter-connect all the different instances of Cupboard...
So, does anybody know a Beautiful Ontology?
Talking about ontology quality is like talking about good code: most of the developers have their own idea about it, which differs slightly from the one of the next guy, providing an open-ended excuse for arguing. Ultimately, nobody knows what is is and how to assess it, but with sufficient experience, you might learn to recognize it.
Hence, one of the best way to discuss and think about such things as ontology quality is by looking at examples. Some ontologies are nice because they are rigorous. Some are interesting because of what they make possible in terms of applications or inferences. Some are elegant because of some particular patterns they apply in their representation...
So, we had this idea with Aldo (one of the most renowned researchers on ontology design and evaluation) to collect such examples of Beautiful Ontologies in a special issue of the Applied Ontology Journal.
So here his the message: If you know any beautiful ontologies, and are prepared to discuss why you think it is beautiful, then send us a paper (short or long) and contribute to what will surely become a reference on ontology quality.
The deadline is the 1st June 2009 and the full call can be found here
Want to Have Serious Fun with the Semantic Web?
Join us at SSSW09!
This year, I am part of the organization of the renowned Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW09). I have to say that I was at the first one in 2003 as a (discrete and shy first year PhD) student, and I cannot wait to be there again this year.
As you can see from the website, the school will again be packed with amazing talks from people like Tom Heath, Peter Mika, Mark Greaves and others. The programme is not yet available on the website (will be soon, I promise) but I can already tell you that we put quite some efforts in making it interesting, dynamic, hands-on and fun. Something not to be missed!
So you should rather be quick, you only have until the 15th April to apply and join us there!