Utility Evaluation of Tools for Collaborative Development and Maintenance of Ontologies Alex Norta1, Roman Yangarber1, Lauri Carlson2 Department of Computer Science1 Department of Computer Science2 University of Helsinki VORTE-MOST'10, October 27th, 2010

Agenda Introduction and research question Ontology tool application context ContentFactory project context specific ontology-features management in context functional and non-functional requirements specification Evaluation of ontology tools method of evaluation tool-triage result results for functional- and non-functional evaluation Conclusions and future work

Introduction Context of evaluation eBS specifications in two formats electronic business services (eBS) for B2B collaboration eBS specifications in two formats human readable and informal specification machine readable and formal specification Ambiguities in both eBS representations must be resolved Need for ontology tools to manage complex situation Intelligent broker systems for eBS management Part of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in clouds

Introduction: the research question Many ontology tools exist for developing and managing ontologies collaborative functionality essential for eBS-based B2B No survey satisfactory for our application context to the best of our knowledge A targeted evaluation fills that gap carefully extracted functional and non-functional requirements evaluation of this method adaptable to comparable studies in other tool application contexts

Context: ContentFactory

Context: specific ontology-management features

Context: functional and non-functional requirements

Evaluation: method Tool-utility formula Criteria For our context u: overall tool utility criteria classes: T (triage), M (must), N (need), C (nice) Θ: respective weight ΘT>ΘM>ΘN>ΘC For our context {3|2|1|0} for criteria classes {4|3|2|1} for respective weights T is knockout criteria

Evaluation: tool-triage result NeOn state-of-the-art, open source, multiple-platform full ontology-engineering lifecycle support Eclipse-based and plugins possible Protége well established, open source, for collaborative ontology development ontology export including RDF(S),OWL, XML CmapTools Ontology Editor intuitive modeling notation for laymen: content maps roundtrip translation available for ontology representation TopBraid Composer enterprise-class ontology engineering environment published API for client/server or browser-based solutions free-edition considered for evaluation HOZO Ontology Editor: provides graphical interface Onto-Studio: helps users with ontology design from technical documents Ontology Server: manages built ontologies and models OntoBroker omited because subset (minus inference machine) is foundation for NeOn

Evaluation: functional evaluation result

Evaluation: functional evaluation result

Conclusions Ontology-tool evaluation performed for context of ContentFactory project with different human and ontological languages ontology tool for eBS brokering for B2B utility of tools for functional and non-functional requirements Triage reduces set of ontology tools collaborative ontology management must be supported tools must be freely available and maintained Utility evaluation by tool developers or with feedback result checked by all NeOn, Protége, CmapTools Ontology, TopBraid Composer, HOZO All tools share OWL-DL as ”ligua franca” Strengths-based combination of tools, e.g.: CmapTools for allowing laymen collaborative ontology development via content maps editing NeOn for managing OWL-DL representation of content maps Protége superior if security of OWL-DL ontology important HOZO for multi-perspective ontology visualization, Asian language support

Future work Study how to take advantage of ontology-tool combinations prevent implementation need of new functionality The evaluation method may be repeated and experimented with in other application context Development and research input based on study to cover pointed out gaps of functional and non-functional requirement coverage

Thank you! Questions, comments?