Tutorial (full-day) at ISWC2007, Busan, Korea, November 2007.
Our tutorial targets ontology modelers and engineers. The goal is to pass on the knowledge we have gathered in a series of industrial and academic projects over the last eight years. The tutorial will provide guidance for the development of ontology-based applications with respect to the complete ontology lifecycle. We illustrate fundamental principles and best practices in ontology design, mapping, evolution and reasoning in practical examples. We exercise ontology engineering and development activities using the NeOn Toolkit, a state-of-the-art open source ontology design environment including support for engineering ontologies and semantic applications.
We will start with an introduction to a variety of use cases for applications of ontologies, including information integration and knowledge management. Based on these use cases we will illustrate a typical ontology lifecycle and discuss specific ontology lifecycle activities, such as ontology design, ontology mapping, and ontology evolution. After a short introduction to the NeOn toolkit and its functionalities, we will take a closer look at how the lifecycle activities are realized using the NeOn toolkit. In the hands-on exercises, the participants will work on practical activities from a real world use case.
In the second half of the tutorial, we will demonstrate how to extend the functionalities of the ontology engineering environment by developing a NeOn plug-in to support an additional lifecycle activity from the initial use case. Therefore, we first provide further insights into the NeOn reference architecture, its plug-in concept and APIs. We will then demonstrate how to develop a plug-in in an easy-to-follow step-by-step way. After that, the participants will create their own working plug-in in a hands-on exercise.
Corresponding author: Peter Haase