Presented by Sandor Dornbush and Joel Sachs University of Maryland Baltimore County

1. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Presented by Sandor Dornbush and Joel Sachs University of Maryland Baltimore County

2. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Overview of Presentation SPIRE (Semantic Prototypes in Research Ecoinformatics) XMDR and the Semantic Web Some Architectural Ideas Questions, Comments, Better ideas?

3. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC

4. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Sandor’s summer project Review XMDR and inventory the semantic services that it can/should provide. Eg provide ontological grounding for terms on the semantic web. Along the way, experiment with items on XMDR’s “to do next year” list. Eg web services.

5. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Can XMDR provide ontological grounding for terms on the semantic web? Idea: When defining (or using) a term, X, in OWL, you should be able to say “I mean by X whatever XMDR says X means.” Motivation 1: Sometimes, the application doesn’t require that the agents involved “understand” a term, but instead requires simply that they mean the same thing by the term. (eg “absolute aspect”.) Motivation 2: Sometimes, the semantics of a term can’t be fully expressed in OWL (at least not easily), and a natural language definition is desirable. (e.g. “kosher”.)

6. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC How to do this? Create a small OWL vocabulary to enable the referencing of XMDR services from within OWL ontologies. Maybe rdfs:see_also already provides this. But probably not. Create the appropriate XMDR web services

7. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Philosophical Objection to XMDR What’s the point of XMDR when we have the semantic web? Shouldn’t the functionality of XMDR be distributed over a collection of services (eg Swoogle); ontologies; and OWL pages? Philosophical Response: Networks do not typically evolve to be fully connected. Instead, hubs arise to provide connectivity as necessary. An instance of XMDR is such a hub on the semantic web, capable of providing a number of semantic services.

8. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC XMDR Architecture Possible New Directions

9. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Current This represents a REST implemntation. All access must be through a browser, probably by a human user.This represents a REST implemntation. All access must be through a browser, probably by a human user.

10. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Proposed Future Jena can use an external DIG reasoner. Pellett is one such reasoner.Jena can use an external DIG reasoner. Pellett is one such reasoner.

11. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Features of Proposed Archictecture New Interfaces New Reasoners

12. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC New Interface Now clients can use a variety of methods to access the service. The client can be written in any language that can speak SOAP. An EJB will perform better under heavy load. The SOAP wrapper can be built automatically from the EJB.

13. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Existing Reasoner “The built-in Jena rule-based reasoners are able to provide semantic entailments for ontologies using OWL-lite, and some constructs from OWL-DL and OWL-full. However, for large or complex ontologies the rule-based approach is computationally very expensive.” -Jena Website

14. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Other Possible Reasoners Pellet an OWL DL reasoner developed by MINDSWAP FaCT Fast Classification of Terminologies a DL reasoner developed by Ian Horrocks ?

15. ebiquity lab, CSEE, UMBC Questions?