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TAO - Transitioning Applications to Ontologies
The goal of the TAO project was to define a low-cost route to transitioning legacy systems to the open semantic Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which was meant to semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications.
Impact
This project's aim was to offer a low-cost migration path for legacy applications to knowledge technologies and to be accessible to both SMEs (which are cost sensitive) and large enterprises (with huge investments in complex and critical IS). The results have been validated in two high-profile case studies: a comprehensive open source platform (with thousands of users) and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business).
Main innovation
There were three main technological innovations in the project:
- Semantic Web Service bootstrapping via semi-automatic acquisition of domain ontologies - an innovative methodology, based on state-of-the-art ontology learning and semantic data integration. SWS bootstrapping is a problem not yet addressed by the SWS community as part of ongoing initiatives and projects both in Europe and internationally.
- Augmentation and integration of legacy content relative to the domain ontologies to enable ontology-based information access.
- Infrastructure for transitioning legacy applications to semantic- and service-based ones. The main innovative aspect of the transitioning environment is the introduction of automation when supporting the developer in creating SWS definitions, based on the semantic analysis of existing application documentation and legacy content. The TAO infrastructure will be based on and compliant with relevant architectures, such as WSMO, WSMX, SWSI.
More details
- Presentation (PDF, 789KB)
- Flyer (PDF, 718KB)
- Poster (PDF, 1.902KB)
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 85KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 160KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 85KB)
- IST Results News in Brief: Helping business exploit the power of semantics (7 April 2006)
- ICT Results article: Semantic solution, a patent commercial success (3 July 2009) Information services company Matrixware has teamed up with a consortium of European researchers to enhance access to its database of patents. The commercial deal points to a bright future for software designed to help organisations make the leap to semantic systems.
- TAO website.
Work
In order to achieve its ambitious goal, the project comprised a number of research and technical development activities, structured as work packages:
- WP1 formulated a methodology covering all aspects of the Semantic Web Services (SWS) bootstrapping process;
- WP2 focused on learning domain ontologies from existing application documentation (specifications, UML diagrams, code documentation, software manuals, incl. images);
- WP3 researched methods for automatic semantic augmentation of legacy content, going beyond textual sources;
- WP4 developed distributed heterogeneous knowledge repositories, capable of efficient indexing, query, and retrieval;
- and WP5 integrated all these into a transition support Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
The achievement of the project's objectives has been validated in two case studies. The first case study (WP6) undertook the transitioning of an existing large-scale open-source system, its software documentation, related papers, video tutorials and screen shots. The resulting ontology- and service-based system acted as a publicly available reference showcase of the TAO technology. The second case study (WP7) focused on providing semantic-based support to aircraft maintenance business processes. Within the reengineered applications, ontology-based representations of maintenance technical data and services have been exploited to ensure semantic interoperability between maintenance management systems and to provide standardised knowledge inputs for user-mediated semantic annotation of technical publications. TAO methodology and platform will be used to elaborate the software support that will allow logistic analysts to build ontologies from existing databases and standards, and to redesign maintenance processes into the semantic-powered SOA framework.
Administrative Details
- TAO (FP6-026460) is a specific targeted research project of the European Union's 6th Framework Programme - call 4.
- TAO started on 1 March 2006 and finished on 29 February 2009.
- The overall budget has been pf around 4.4 million euro, and seven partners from five European countries have been involved in the project.
List of Participants
- University of Sheffield, UK
- University of Southampton, UK
- Atos Origin S.A.E, Spain
- Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
- Mondeca, France
- Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group Corp., Bulgaria
- Dassault Aviation, France
Contact Person
- Project Coordinator:
- Dr. Kalina Bontcheva
- Department of Computer Science
- University of Sheffield
- Regent Court
- 211 Portobello Street
- Sheffield S1 4DP - UK
- Tel: +44 114 222 1930
- Fax: +44 114 222 1810
- Website
Events in connection with TAO
- ESWC2008. TAO: A Hands-on Tutorial.
- ESWC2006. Tao poster presented (PDF, 1.902KB).
- SWESE2006. Tao paper presented: Learning Ontologies from Software Artifacts: Exploring and Combining Multiple Sources (PDF, 194KB).