Towards semantic software engineering environments

Software tools processing partially common set of data should share an understanding of what these data mean. Since ontologies have been used to express formally a shared understanding of information, we argue that they are a way towards Semantic SEEs. In this paper we discuss an ontology-based approach to tool integration and present ODE, an ontology-based SEE

How to Find Suitable Ontologies Using an Ontology-based WWW Broker

Knowledge reuse by means of outologies now faces three important problems: (1) there are no standardized identifying features that characterize ontologies from the user point of view; (2) there are no web sites using the same logical organization, presenting relevant information about ontologies; and (3) the search for appropriate ontologies is hard, time-consuming and usually fruitless. To solve the above problems, we present: (1) a living set of features that allow us to characterize ontologies from the user point of view and have the same logical organization; (2) a living domain ontology about ontologies (called ReferenceOntology) that gathers, describes and has links to existing ontologies; and (3) (ONTO)2Agent, the ontology-based www broker about ontologies that uses the Reference Ontology as a source of its knowledge and retrieves descriptions of ontologies that satisfy a given set of constraints. (ONTO)~Agent is available at http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/REFERENCE ONTOLOGY

Guidelines to Study Differences in Expressiveness between Ontology Specification Languages: A Case Of Study

We focus on our experiences on translating ontologies between two ontology languages, FLogic and Ontolingua, in the framework of Methontology and ODE. Rather than building "ad hoc" translators between languages or using KIF, our option consists of translating through ODE intermediate representations. So, we have built direct translators from ODE intermediate representations to Ontolingua and FLogic, and we have also built reverse translators from these two languages to ODE intermediate representations. Expressiveness of the target languages is the main feature to analyse when automatically generating ontologies from ODE intermediate representations. Therefore, we analyse the expressiveness of Ontolingua and FLogic for creating classes, instances, relations, functions and axioms, which are the essential components in ontologies. The motivation for this analysis can be found in the (KA)² initiative and can be easily extended to any other domains and languages

'BioNessie(G) - a grid enabled biochemical networks simulation environment

The simulation of biochemical networks provides insight and understanding about the underlying biochemical processes and pathways used by cells and organisms. BioNessie is a biochemical network simulator which has been developed at the University of Glasgow. This paper describes the simulator and focuses in particular on how it has been extended to benefit from a wide variety of high performance compute resources across the UK through Grid technologies to support larger scale simulations