WebOnto fact-file

What's the Problem?

The WebOnto project started in 1997 with the aim to develop a web-based ontology editor, providing more sophisticated browsing, visualization and editing facilities than those available from existing solutions, such as the Ontolingua server.

WebOnto was designed to support the collaborative browsing, creation and editing of ontologies without suffering from the interface problems associated with standard HTML-based editors, such as limited support for direct manipulation interfaces, inability to handle asynchronous communication (e.g., inability to send prompts reminding the user to save the data), and limited support for graphical interfaces.

To avoid these problems WebOnto is implemented as a Java Applet, and includes both a graphical user interface, for coarse-grained browsing, and fine grained inspector windows, to home in on detailed data. WebOnto also provides a rich set of options to customize the presentation of information, which makes it easy to navigate large ontologies. The OCML language provides the underlining representation for WebOnto models.

Finally WebOnto also provides a client API, which can be used to retrieve information from WebOnto ontologies and for running applications built using WebOnto.

WebOnto is shown in the screen snapshots below. The right hand side shows the subclasses of class organization in the AKT reference ontology, while the inspector window shows the information associated with the instance "john domingue".

The second snapshot displays a knowledge acquisition form, which has been opened by the user to edit the information associated with "john domingue".

Take a Guided Tour

A QuickTime movie will soon be added here to illustrate WebOnto in action.

Try a Demonstration

The WebOnto ontology server can be accessed on the web at http://webonto.open.ac.uk/. No special permission is needed to browse existing ontologies. Creating and editing new ontologies requires an account. This can be obtained by emailing John Domingue

Technical requirements:

Windows 98, 2000 or XP, Netscape browser.

Example Applications

Several dozen ontologies and KBs can be found at http://webonto.open.ac.uk/

Further Reading

Domingue, J., Motta, E. and Corcho Garcia, O. (1999) Knowledge Modelling in WebOnto and OCML: A User Guide. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/webonto/user_guide.2.4.pdf

Domingue, J. (1998) Tadzebao and WebOnto: Discussing, Browsing, and Editing Ontologies on the Web. 11th Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop, April 18th-23rd. Banff, Canada, http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/domingue/banff98-paper/domingue.html

Semantic representation

View in the AKT Triplestore Browser or as RDF.

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project)