[seek-kr-sms] peer-to-peer ontology editing using jxta

[Ferdinando Villa]

Hey Matt,

thanks for the link. On this topic and possibly of interest for SEEK: in
an EU project I'm involved in we're facing the challenge of having a
large community define consensual ontologies for data/model integration,
but there's no realistic hope to bring that community (agricultural) to
speed on KR concepts (I'm having serious trouble with the DEVELOPERS!).
The most you can ask is have them develop a controlled vocabulary and a
sketch of relationships, that a KR team can later crystallize into a
formal ontology. I think this reflects a maximum likelihood scenario -
projects that need semantic annotation but can't print the word
"ontology" in the user manual! So I'm exploring the idea of a Wiki
tailored to the purpose, where people can discuss freely but have
specific wiki tags for concepts and relationships, an intuitive
interface with up-to-date growl-like graphical depiction of the
knowledge gathered so far, and a background information extraction
process that collects tags from the wiki pages and does a first pass of
formalization in real time. I know there are a few projects along those
lines:

http://platypuswiki.sourceforge.net/
http://rhizome.liminalzone.org
http://www.gnowsis.org
http://www.ideagraph.net
http://www.xam.de/
http://infomesh.net/2001/05/sw/#rdfwiki

but so far I haven't seen any serious alternative to writing it
ourselves on top of an existing wiki. Still I think it's a valid "other"
approach to collaborative knowledge editors, which are out of the
question for certain communities. Is this anything that other KR/SMS
people have been thinking about or are interested in?

Ciao f

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 20:40, Matt Jones wrote:
> Sergui et al.,
> 
> While exploring JXTA for use in distributed computing for Kepler, I came 
> across this innovative use of JXTA to build a collabroative ontology 
> editor.  Thought you might be interested.
> 
> http://www.jxta.org/research/P02-GeraldoCoppeer.pdf
> 
> Matt
-- 
Ferdinando Villa, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor, Ecoinformatics
Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and Dept of Botany, Univ. of Vermont
http://ecoinformatics.uvm.edu