Dr Stephen Cranefield, Department of Information Science

Title: "A Lightweight Ontology Repository"
Multi-agent systems and the Semantic Web are two active areas of research that aim to allow open and dynamic networks of distributed computer programs to share information and exchange services. A key feature of both fields is the use of high-level semantic models of problem domains, called 'ontologies'. Ontologies are intended to be publicly available models that agent developers (and, in the future, agents themselves) can reference and readily access. This requires the existence of ontology repositories: online libraries of ontologies that can be used by ontology designers and users to publish and retrieve ontologies and information about them. This talk will discuss the design and implementation of an ontology repository based on open Web standards rather than the specialised interfaces and protocols used by previous approaches. Key features of the system include the use of the HTTP protocol following the REST architectural style, the representation of the recorded information about ontologies and the repository information schema using the Semantic Web knowledge representation language RDF and its schema language RDFS, and the use of uniform resource names (URNs) to identify ontologies.