[seek-dev] [Bug 1258] New: - store, query, and access ontologies in ecogrid

[Rich Williams]

Hi -

I saw this bug posting in my email and thought I could provide some helpful
context.  There are some tools available in the semantic web community that
address many of the needs of the ecogrid system, though of course not in a
grid computing environment.

Jena (http://jena.sourceforge.net/) is a set of open source Java tools that
grew out of the HP semantic web effort.  They were chosen by the Protege
group when they decided to add OWL support to Protege, a choice that I
believe is indicative of the relative maturity of the Jena tools.  Jena
includes parsing of RDF and OWL from various text representations,
persistent (database) storage of RDF triples, RDF and OWL APIs, an RDF query
language, and support for inference engines.  I recently began working with
the Jena APIs and found them relatively easy to learn and it has so far been
reliable.

There are various European based semantic web initiatives that provide tools
in various states of development.  Check out
http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/ and http://www.ontoknowledge.org/.  I've
been adapting the WonderWeb OWLAPI for use in the OWL version of
OntoBrowser.  It definitely shows its 'alpha' status - the code for reading
ontologies and exposing them in a set of Java classes is well developed, but
the code for writing the ontology back out in OWL/RDF is not as reliable and
I've had to fix some bugs in it.

I hope this is useful.

Rich