[seek-dev] RE: Codex and GrOWL (and other related) visualization efforts

Mark Gahegan mng1 at psu.edu
Mon May 10 07:50:45 PDT 2004


Hi Serguei,

>Bertram, Bill, and Mark,
> From the paper I did not get clear idea if you are using OWL in Codex.

Yes, it can use OWL, though we currently use the Jena API, not OWLAPI.

>  I
>think that the current GrOWL could be easily plugged in into any OWL
>processing application that uses Wonderweb OWLAPI. As soon as Jena
>supports persistant storage and RDQL queries we may think of writing
>Jena based version of GrOWL with   support for graphic queries
>generating RDQL output, but particularities of this query/persistent
>storage direction of work must be discussed. How about you guys, what
>kind of ontology language /API you are using/planning to use?
>
>Bertram, on Santa-Barbara workshop you made me to think about benefits
>of decidable system that can check subsumption and consistency. In a way
>you had converted us to DL "faith". I started to think that   OWL/DL or
>DL  based systems have very interesting perspectives in developing
>knowledge bases. I wonder if  Bill and Mark would share this
>appreciation of advantages associated with DL?

I, for one, would welcome description logics.  We have an interesting gap, 
I think, between the semi-formal concept map and the more formal conceptual 
graph that would be a far happier place from which to conduct 
inference.  The gap seems to stem from the fact that users do not typically 
think formally when describing their understanding, hence our concept maps 
in Codex are not rigorous enough to be reasoned with as formal 
ontologies.  The interesting question for me is how you get from a concept 
map to a conceptual graph, or some other formal, self-consistent 
representation.

mark


>Serguei,
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bertram Ludaescher [mailto:ludaesch at sdsc.edu]
>Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 7:44 AM
>To: ferdinando.villa at uvm.edu; Serguei Krivov
>Cc: Mark Gahegan; Bill Pike; Efrat Jaeger; Kai Lin;
>seek-dev at ecoinformatics.org
>Subject: Codex and GrOWL (and other related) visualization efforts
>
>
>Ferdinando, Serguei:
>
>Having just seen a very nice demo of GrOWL and your plans to do a
>collaborative version of it, I wanted to point you to the Codex work
>done by Bill Pike and Mark Gahegan at Penn State. Here is a link
>(there must be others to the code):
>
>http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-83/sia_1.p
>df
>
>Maybe you and the Penn State folks want to see how you could join
>forces (maybe even come of with a joint GrOWL+Codex tool?)
>
>Codex and other tools that Kai Lin has been working with are currently
>used for GEON ontology visualization and editing.
>
>It would be great if Kai, Bill and Mark, and you guys could link up to
>make your tools interoperable (or even work towards a joint toolkit!?)
>
>Bertram

---
Mark Gahegan
GeoVISTA Center
Penn State Geography 




More information about the Seek-dev mailing list