KMi Seminars
KANNEL: a Framework for Detecting and Managing Relations between Ontologies in Large Ontology Repository.
This event took place on Wednesday 27 May 2009 at 11:30

 
Carlo Alloca KMi, The Open University

Ontologies are the pillars of the Semantic Web (SW) and, as more and more ontologies are made available online, the SW is quickly taking shape. As a result, the research community is becoming more and more aware that ontologies are not isolated artifacts: they are, explicitly or implicitly, related with each other. Indeed, a number of studies have intended to tackle some of the challenges raised by ontology relationships, from both theoretical and practical points of view. We propose and describe KANNEL, a framework for detecting and managing semantic relations between ontologies for large ontology repositories. It is based on the DOOR ontology. Basically, it is a semantic structure (ontology with rules), which represents and formalizes important ontology relations on the Semantic Web. Making explicit implicit relations between ontologies provides meta-information that facilitates the development of Semantic Web Applications. In addiction, applied in the context of a large collection of automatically crawled ontologies, DOOR and KANNEL provide a starting point for analyzing the underlying structure of the network of ontologies that is the Semantic Web.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.