State of Semantic Web: Ontology Aspects
Rudi Studer & Raphael Volz
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS
FZI Research Center for Information
Technologies, KM Department (WIM)
http://www.fzi.de/wim
L3S Learning Lab, Hannover/Karlsruhe
http://www.learninglab.de
Ontoprise GmbH, Karlsruhe
http://www.ontoprise.de
DAML PI Meeting, Portland, October 2002

Developing the Semantic Web...
Research Aspects
Application-oriented vs. basic research
Objectives and challenges
Funding strategies
DARPA, EU, ...
vs.
User & Industrial Application Impact
Product development
User take-up

User & Industrial Application Impact in the Near Future
A lot of real-life applications need a flexible way of
starting with a small amount of semantics
enhancing the application gradually with more
and more semantics

Keep entry barrier as low as possible!

User & Industrial Application Impact in the Near Future : Ontology Management
Usability/Usage
Connect to well-established modeling paradigm
exploit industry know-how, e.g. UML, EER
Keep initial learning effort small
Light-weight ontologies pay off in a lot of applications
see e.g. our On-To-Knowledge project experience
Skill management (Swiss Life, Switzerland)
Project management (British Telecom, UK)
Different application domains raise different requirements

User & Industrial Application Impact in the Near Future : Ontology Management
Implementation Aspects
Exploit well-known implementation techniques
to which extent do they meet the requirements
that are set up by OWL / OWL Lite?
Rely on scalable methods
what can we take/learn from the DB community?

User & Industrial Application Impact

User & Industrial Application Impact

Research Topics from an Industry Application Perspective
Ontology and Metadata Management
Evolution / Versioning
Learning / Metadata generation
Support incremental approaches
Engineering multiple ontologies / Mapping
Personalization / Views
First methods and tools are available, but a lot of aspects have to be clarified for industry applications

Research Topics from an Industry Application Perspective
Scalability Issues
Handling hundreds of interconnected ontologies
Efficient handling of large-scale ontologies
Metadata repositories
Appropriate transaction mechanisms

Keep notions simple enough to be able to provide applicable solutions!

Thank you!
Rudi Studer & Raphael Volz
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS
FZI Research Center for Information
Technologies, KM Department (WIM)
http://www.fzi.de/wim
L3S Learning Lab, Hannover/Karlsruhe
http://www.learninglab.de
Ontoprise GmbH, Karlsruhe
http://www.ontoprise.de