Scientific and technical work goals

Ontology-Design and Development of an Ontology-Wiki

The ontology-wiki enables the scientific community to interactively and cooperatively build up and edit domain-specific ontologies in OWL. In this way new scientific research results can be implemented promptly, the encouragement to reach a consensus within the community will help to avoid redundancies. Furthermore it can be extended for the use of multimedia-based content (e. g. visualization of three-dimensional molecular structures) and specific biological data formats.

Ontological concepts will be created and linked directly by the user community via the ontology-wiki and, additionally, by semi-automatic information extraction from scientific publications. In this way a knowledge base is established, which can improve flexible information access and navigation. The ontology can also be used to describe competencies and areas of expertise of scientists and research-groups, so that, for example, the formation of teams for special tasks or the matching of co-operation partners can be facilitated.

Another essential part of Ontoverse will be the communication within the community of ontology-designers, realized by providing systems for annotation. Different teams construct and work on the same ontology and are able to use internal communication channels to discuss appropriate ways of modelling metadata during the process of development. Different kinds of visualization tools support ontology-designers realizing to which consequences their work on the ontology will lead. Thus for the first time the construction of large and complex ontologies is becoming feasible even for huge communities.

Development and provision of a grid-based information extraction application.

Based on the fact that more than 80% off all stored information is textual, it is assumed that information extraction from documents has a high application potential. Thereby the integration of grid-technology and web services is beginning to play a major role for information processing in scientific environments. Upcoming ontologies, which will cover a huge scientific field, will enable new kinds of web services. With grid-technology computing resources and capacities for storage and data transfer can be used more efficiently and cost-effectively. This ensures the highest possible scalability and availability of applications. Resources are getting virtualized, so that even distributed processing capacities, mass storage systems and bandwidths make up a unified framework.

Prototype-Ontologies within the life science domain, which will be built by the Ontoverse partners in the context of the project, will form the basis for an information extraction application. Based on these ontologies an extraction tool will identify texts, that align with the knowledge formalized in the ontology, and will further classify entities contained in these texts according to their defined classes. Grid-technology simplifies indexing and handling of huge amounts of documents by provision of scalable, secure and high-performance mechanisms for indexing distributed sources.

Development of technical incentive systems for trustworthy cooperation systems.

The incentives to participate in the Ontoverse-platform will increase the more the users will benefit from the platform itself. In turn, the benefit the platform can offer depends on the participation of the users. Therefore a main focus of the project has to be the integration of utilities for community-building.

To develop efficient services and utilities for cooperation as well as an innovative and effective cooperation culture and to handle complex information structures accordingly, first of all the rights of individuals and groups have to be kept permanently secured and justiciable on qualified cooperation platforms. The realization of open standards for trustworthy cooperation systems and a secure management of rights and authorizations within the framework of Ontoverse will be supported by the development of adequate technical incentive systems.

Project partners