Development of Basic Tools for Web-Based Ontology Annotation, Visualization and Comparison

Description of Work

In recent years ontology development has become one of the major enabling technologies of the Semantic Web. One of the better known tools for ontology building is Protege (http://protege.stanford.edu), which includes a tool for editing ontologies in OWL (Web Ontology Language). Whereas Protege in itself is not Web-based, its developers have recently come up with a Web-based version called WebProtege (http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/WebProtege).

The goal of the proposed work is to extend the WebProtege environment by with the following functionality:

• an interface that allows users to insert/edit their annotations/comments on specific components of an ontology written in OWL;
• a basic ontology visualization tool;
• an ontology comparison tool which, given two ontologies, outputs the differences between them in a fashon similar to that of the "diff" command in Unix/Linux.

Required Skills

• strong background in software engineering
• HTML
• Java
• Willingness to acquire at least the basic notions concerning ontologies and to learn about Protege-OWL.
• knowledge of J2EE architecture will definetely be a plus.

To join this project, please email to: Melanie.Hilario@unige.ch