Dear All, during the Copenhagen meeting Martin told me that there were several people who doubt that the CRM expressed in RDF could be processed by popular ontology editors such as Stanford Protege-2000. Since this is my favourite tool for hacking ontologies *including* the CRM, I think it might be useful if I give a short overview of software tools I know of that can be useful for modelling and application development using the RDF version of the CRM.
All software packages are open source and freeware. Unless otherwise noted, these are Java applications that require a recent version of the JVM or JDK installed on your machine. Suitable Java packages are available free of charge from Sun or IBM. -------------------------------------------------------------- Ontology Editors Protégé-2000 from Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI) http://protege.stanford.edu/ This package has been around for several years, is actively maintained, and has a fairly large user base. Many people have contributed plug-ins that supply interfaces to other storage formats and KR software packages, visualization, and data acquisition facilities. Useful features that I have tried so far include a nice HTML documentation generator, the visualization package, a database storage backend using JDBC, and the facility to combine and merge several (partial) ontologies. XML and Schema support seems to be broken in the versions I have tried. As a modelling tool, Protege allows you to extend the CRM by creating sub-classes and sub-relations as well as instances. Instances are kept neatly separated from class and property definitions, e.g. by writing classes and properties to an RDFS file while aggregating all instances in an accompanying RDF file. Protege loads all recent RDF versions of the CRM without a problem. OilED from the University of Manchester http://oiled.man.ac.uk/index.shtml This is the current standard tool for editing DAML+OIL, an RDF-based KR language. It claims to be the "NotePad of ontology editors". OilEd loads RDF versions of the CRM (make sure to import them as RDF, not RDFS). To my taste, OilED is a bit more cumbersome to handle than Protege when used as a CRM modelling tool. Models can be verified with an external reasoning engine (FaCT) that comes with the package. Although I haven't played around with OilED to any significant extent, I assume that this can be useful as a shuttle in and out of DAML, a KR language in which an increasing number of terminologies, thesauri and ontologies are being published. OilED produces documentation in HTML similar to that obtained from Protege. Export options include simple RDFS, a SHIQ representation in XML from the Description Logics Implementation Group (DIG), and a simple vector graphics format. All export conversions seem to work well for the CRM. IsaViz from the W3C http://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/ This is announced as a "visual authoring tool for RDF". It will read the CRM in RDF and produce an awesome display of the entire model. When it comes to authoring, however, anything more complex than two or three RDF triples will be practically impossible to handle via the current user interface. Programmers' Toolkits Apart from the work done on RDF databases and query languages at ICS-FORTH (on which Martin may be able to comment), there are two packages that I find worth mentioning: Redland RDF Application Framework from ILRT Bristol http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/ This seems to be a solid library written in C with APIs for various languages, including Java. A query language is not included. However, there are several applications built on top of Redland, some of which provide database and query functionality. Jena RDF API from HP Labs, Bristol http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/bwm/rdf/jena/ For those doing application development in Java, this one seems to be first choice. It comes with a very good tutorial. Working my way through the examples went smoothly and, of course, it digests the CRM in RDF without a hiccup. Finally, for those looking for an RDF parser for Visual Basic, there is a tiny package named Thea: http://www.semanticweb.gr/download.php?op=viewdownload&cid=3 This relies on Microsoft's XML3 DLL which is notorious for having difficulties with RDF syntax. CRM: no luck. ---------------------------------------------------------------- - Detlev
