presentation of the demo paper "SOBOLEO - Editor and Repository for Living Ontologeis" at ORES 2010 workshop, co-located with ESWC 2010, Crete, May 31 2010

1. SOBOLEO –
Editor and Repository for Living Ontologies
Simone Braun &
Valentin Zacharias
FZI Research Center for
Information Technologies
Karlsruhe, Germanyhttp://tool.soboleo.com

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SOBOLEO
 SOBOLEO supports the development
and refinement of living ontologies
according to the principles of
Ontology Maturing
 SOBOLEO is a web-based system
that enables groups of people to
jointly structure information (web
documents and people) in a domain

3. 33MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks
Annotate People & Search

4. 44
SOBOLEO
 SOBOLEO uses Simple Knowledge Organisation System
Format for representing ontologies

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SOBOLEO
 SOBOLEO provides an architecture
that enables diverse components
(both remote and within SOBOLEO)
to jointly work with living ontologies

6. 66MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

7. 77
SOBOLEO
Try SOBOLEO at:
http://tool.soboleo.com/
No Registration, No Installation
Dr. Valentin Zacharias
zach@fzi.de
Simone Braun
braun@fzi.de

8. Backup Details
MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

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Living Ontologies, Ontology Maturing &
their Use Cases

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Living Ontologies & Ontology Maturing
 Living Ontologies are ontologies that are
• never finished
• used and developed at the same time by the end users
 We describe their engineering with the Ontology
Maturing Process Model
• understanding their development as a continuous and
collaborative process embedded & interwoven with actual usages
processes

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Use Case 1
 A learning course that is jointly developing an
understanding of a domain by creating an ontology and
interlinking it with relevant documents
 For this use case SOBOLEO is integrated with a
discussion tool to support structured dialogs about
ontology development and document annotations
 SOBOLEO supports the management of ontology,
documents and dialogs
 The ontology is also evolving throughout its use –
always reflecting the current knowledge of the course
participants

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Use Case 2
 A group of experts jointly collecting the state-of-the-
art in a scientific domain (with links to both documents
and experts)
 Here too the ontology will constantly evolve to reflect
both the knowledge of the experts as well as the
current scientific consensus

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Use Case 3
 An HR department organizing data about available
experts through semantic people tagging
 SOBOLEO supports maintaining a competency ontology
and using this ontology to keep track of - and search
within - the database of experts
 The competency ontology is never really finished – as
new possible skills are emerging all the time.

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SOBOLEO – Concepts and Architecture

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Concepts: Collaboration Spaces
 A Collaboration Space is the virtual space in which
collaboration between people with a shared goal takes place
 Each Collaboration Space has one SKOS ontology and may
have information about documents and experts that are
annotated with this ontology
 All information in a space is jointly edited by the members
of this space
 One SOBOLEO installation supports an arbitrary number of
(completely independent except for user data) collaboration
spaces
 On the server each collaboration space is represented as one
folder that can even be moved between SOBOLEO
installations

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Concepts: Event Bus & Events
 Technically each collaboration space is represented by
an Event Bus component that manages the
communication within the space
 Different parts of the functionality are realized as
services (both local within the server and remote) that
are registered with the event bus
 Communication within the space is organized around
the concept of Events:
• Command Events, Query Event, Notification Event
 All events exist as Java & JavaScript objects, as XML
serializations, and as SOAP methods
• any remote clients can do arbitrary changes and receive
notifications

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Example – Delete Concept
1. Delete-Concept command triggered by user interaction

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Example – Delete Concept
2. Event bus asks registered Ontologoy Management service to
extend this command event with implied commands

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Example – Delete Concept
3. Event Permission – this tests the user credentials as well as the
adherence to SKOS integrity constraints

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Example – Delete Concept
4. Command processors actually execute the change

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Example – Delete Concept
5. Result is sent back to the requester and all registered event
listeners are notified of the changes that have been done

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A look at SOBOLEO‘s User Interface

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SOBOLEO User Interface
 SOBOLEO has interfaces for
• Editing SKOS ontologies
• Annotating documents & people
• Search
• Browse documents & people
• And much more (administration, people directory, people
profiles, history display, dialog transcript view, gardening
recommendations)
 SOBOLEO is completely web-based (implemented as
Java Servlets)
 User interface implemented in GWT (runs as Java
Script in browser)

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UserInterface-Editor

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Annotate Documents

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Browse