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NeOn - Lifecycle support for Networked Ontologies
NeOn addresses the complete R&D cycle of the emerging new generation of semantically enriched applications, which exist and operate in an open environment of highly contextualized, evolving and networked ontologies. NeOn aims to achieve and facilitate the move from feasibility in principle to a concrete solution focusing on cost efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge acquisition for, and design, development and maintenance of large-scale, heterogeneous semantic-based applications.
Impact
NeOn targets two core areas where a mid-term impact is expected; namely:
- the pharmaceutical domain - by locating and combining the relevant but widely distributed semantic tags describing a particular medicine, medical knowledge or medical regulation, a solution based on the NeOn's innovative architecture, methodology and toolkit, will make it possible to automate the process of collecting, reconciling and integrating the information provided by complex distributed networks involving suppliers, distributors, regulators and pharmacists, which are typical for the pharmaceutical domain.
- the domain of information systems for ecology and public awareness - the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, on the other hand, will use the NeOn technology to implement a new fishery alert mechanism for managing international fish stocks, which will integrate and monitor megabytes of textual and numeric data generated by the existing distributed databases, repositories and geographic information systems.
Main innovation
As the complexity of semantically aware applications increases, more and more knowledge will be drawn from a wide variety of sources to be embedded in the applications. This new generation of knowledge processing applications will be based on ontologies as one of its cornerstones. Application design needs to reflect the fact that (i) any newly developed ontologies are typically embedded in a network of already existing ones, and (ii) ontologies and metadata are subject to evolution and have to be kept up-to-date within the changing application environments.
Therefore, in order to support design and development of such semantically enriched applications, new methods, techniques and tools are needed to facilitate the evolution, contextual adaptation and collaborative nature of ontologies, while still guaranteeing their "local consistency". NeOn innovations aim to provide more efficient and scalable support for the entire lifecycle of the networked ontologies development. In particular, NeOn focuses on methods and tools for managing the dynamics of contextualized networked ontologies, methods and tools for collaborative development of contextualized networked ontologies, methods and tools for using and reasoning with contextualized networks of ontologies, as well as cost-effective methods for ontology customization and navigation in response to the users' tasks, requirements and security considerations.
The core outcome of the NeOn project includes a generic reference architecture, which is intended to provide a de-facto software development standard. To this extent, NeOn collaborates with key business and institutions who are today's leaders in the area of ontology engineering and design applications - both in the EU and in the US. This reference architecture would be accompanied by a set of methodologies for designing and for applying networked ontologies, and by a tangible implementation in a shape of marketable NeOn toolkit.
Results so far
During its first year the NeOn project has made considerable progress towards its objectives. In particular the following results have been produced:
- A formal model for characterizing and reasoning with networked ontologies, which will be uses as a reference within the entire project.
- A novel approach for resolving inconsistency and incoherence in ontologies, which has been implemented in a software prototype called RaDON (Repair and Diagnosis for Ontology Networks).
- Novel algorithms for automatically decomposing large ontologies in smaller modules, according to user requirements.
- The C-ODO ontology, which supports the process of modelling requirements and solutions related to the collaborative design of networked ontologies.
- A formalism for context representation in NeOn, which focuses on characterizing two specific forms of context: Provenance and Arguments.
- A task-based observational user study, during which the problems confronted by ontology engineers tacking NeOn-related scenarios have been empirically analysed. The results of this study, which was presented at the 2006 OWL workshop, include a concrete set of requirements, which emerged from the analysis of the data, which will drive the development of the NeOn Toolkit.
- An initial framework for characterising access rights, which has been defined consistently with the formal NeOn model for defining networks of ontologies.
- An initial inventory of NeOn Modelling Components, which defines design patterns to be used to model networks of ontologies collaboratively.
- The specification of the architecture of the NeOn Toolkit and an initial implementation of its key infrastructure components.
- Software designs for the three planned applications in the pharmaceutical and fishery domain.
The first release of the NeOn Toolkit, one of the core outcomes of the NeOn project, is available for download and testing from the NeOn Toolkit & Community site.
More details
- ICT Results feature in two parts
- Article 1 (23 June 2008): Designing semantic software by numbers
- Article 2 (25 June 2008): Managing fisheries with semantic technologies
- The latest edition (19 February 2008) of 'NeOn Highlights' (PDF 918KB) provide a window onto NeOn's achievements and developments to date. It gives an insight into NeOn research agenda and the motivations of the partners and people working in the NeOn Project, including interviews with case study partners The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Laboratorios Kin.
- Presentation (PDF 1.524KB)
- Flyer (PDF 134KB)
- Annual Report 2008 (ZIP 5.871KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF 1.233KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF 1.033KB)
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Press Release: Overfishing alert system: a challenge for electronic communication FAO-EU meeting on new frontiers and projects in global knowledge exhange (20 March 2006)
- IST Results News in Brief: Taking Semantics further (27 January 2006)
- NEON project Website
Administrative Details
- NeOn, & Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies , is an Integrated Project (IP), financed by the 6th Framework Programme of the EU.
- Start date: 1 March 2006
- End date: 28 February 2010
- The project's budget is €14.7M, with the European Commission providing a €10.2 million grant.
- 14 partners from 6 European countries are involved in the project.
List of Participants
The research institutions include world-leading groups in the field of ontologies, collaborative technologies, context management and human-computer interaction:
- The Open University, UK (co-ordinator)
- Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
- Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
- Software AG, Germany
- iSOCO S.A., Spain
- Institut 'Jozef Stefan', Slovenia
- Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), France
- University of Sheffield, UK
- Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Italy
- Ontoprise GmbH, Germany
- Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico, Spain
- United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, Italy
- Atos Origin sae, Spain
Contact Persons
Events in connection with NeOn
- ISWC 2007 + ASWC 2007 held in Busan, Korea the 11-15 November 2007. The NeOn Project is sponsoring the event, and the NeOn Toolkit goes Open Source , taking place on 13 November.
- ESWC held in Innsbruck, Austria the 3-7 June 2007. The NeOn project announced the NeOn Glowfest series of events that aim to gather the members - users and developers - of the NeOn community. The first Glowfest Event was an introduction to the NeOn Toolkit.
- IST Event 2006 (21-23 November 2006 in Helsinki, Finland) - The NeOn project contributed through the workshop: Building semantic knowledge applications.
- ISWC 2006 the 5-9 November 2006 in Athens, Georgia (USA) was sponsored by the NeOn project, and a keynote talk was given by prof. dr Rudi Studer: The Semantic Web: Suppliers and Customers - Paper (PDF 43KB) and Presentation (PDF 1.053KB). Find also the Video capture of the keynote.
NeOn results have been presented at all the major venues relevant to semantic web and ontology engineering in the past 12 months, and in particular the NeOn Scientific Directors have been invited to give keynote speeches at the last two major international semantic web conferences, the Asian Semantic Web Conference in Beijing, and the International Semantic Web Conference held in Athens, Georgia. Publications and reports can be viewed and downloaded from NeOn's website.