wiki:Brainstorm_patch_for_eXe_and_objective_ontologies

This is a place for organising the ideas, thoughts and useful links arising from an initial brainstorm in the eXe forums. This represents the second phase for developing a use case on "objective" ontologies. Our final objective is to generate a range of use cases for future development of eXe. There are guidelines for developing eXe use cases. You can also have a look at the following examples to see what the product will look like:

We follow the open traditions associated with wikis, and at any time you are free to draft a paragraph for the parent use case. Don't worry, if the eXe community refine your ideas - they will <smile>.

You are free to alter, change and adapt this wiki page as the project progresses. Have fun.

Add headings as needed

Add content, subheadings, new pages etc here. Useful web links can be listed under the heading below.

Standards for the representation of ontologies

Tools for ontologies management or for the semantic web

Protégé, Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System. Open Source Software in java. Written by Natasha Noy and contributors.

The Ontolingua Server: a Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction (1996) by Adam Farquhar, Richard Fikes, James Rice article

Magpie - the Semantic Filter - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/magpie/main.html : There's a plugin for Firefox available, not quite an extension (you have to unzip and install thru a readme) but perhaps worth a look.

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/technologies.cfm

Ontology tools for genes classification (various ontology managers tools and software)

Ontology manager at Eduforge (version beta).

Graphical representations, concept maps

  • We must find intuitive ways for users to select and view ontologies. Click on example under demo on this French site.
  • More information on conceptual graphs or topic maps on google
  • A free to use topic mapping tool: cMapTools
  • Automated Tree-drawing, a solution for a xlst to tree view conversion
  • A current and popular way to display 'tags/folksonomies' is with a tagcloud: see my del.icio.us tags for an example: http://del.icio.us/simp. scroll down past all my tags and select "view as cloud" or see the front page of http://www.43things.com/
  • Drupla.org is a CMS that lets you very easily organize your content according to complex taxonomies. Open source, PHP, MySQL, it combines the advantages of folksonomies with one word tagging and size-dependent tag formating with the advantages of a complex ontology, with the possibility to structure nodes within a tree, with eventually multiple node-parent relationships, synonyms declaration, or associations between nodes of independently defined tree being defined. You will find a working demo at http://widged.com/etivities/?q=taxonomy_dhtml with a taxonomy that lists dewey main divisions and many of LOM limited vocabularies within a tree-organization. If a freemind module is installed, the taxonomy defined for navigating the cms can be converted into a topic map representation, as illustrated at http://widged.com/freemind/education_taxonomies.html, thanks to either a flash or a java applet. Links can be added to any node to point to either local or remote document. With the flash applet, a search box can be made available to search the tree content. On top of the flash and java applets, the freemind project provides a standalone application for the editing of the topic maps, available for most platforms. Freemind is an opensource project advertised on sourceforge http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/.
  • Further links maintained in the rev-education wiki Graphs and Plots information

Existing ontologies

  • Eric Thesaurus
  • Dewey Decimal Classification System and a tutorial about the webDewey classification
  • The classification used by OpenDirectory "Open Source Mozilla OpenDirectory? Project. All of its editors are volunteers. It has cataloged nearly 2.5 million sites using principles similar to those of Yahoo! The big deal, though, is that it makes both its taxonomy (organizational structure for content) and its contents available for anyone who wishes to use it."
  • The classification used by eduforge
  • The classification used by Wikiversity

More resources

  • Metadata Taxonomies And Vocabularies page on the EdTechPost? website
  • Natalya Fridman Noy, Deborah L. McGuinness?. "Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology". Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05. March 2001. article
  • Lee, K., Rover, D. T. (xxx). A Web Services and Ontology Based Performance Visualization Framework for Grid Environments article
  • Kwok-Chu Ng, G. (2000). Interactive Visualisation Techniques for ontology development. PhD thesis
  • Will LSM (Latent Semantic Analysis) help? See this article for a brief introduction.
  • OntoEdu?: A Case Study of Ontology-based Education Grid System.
  • An excellent paper: Next-Generation Educational Software: Why We Need It and a Research Agenda for Getting It. Download from Educause.
  • Thoughts about ontology in e-learning: Process-aware Authoring of Web-based Educational Systems, download here.