=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Linked Open Ontology Services
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-596/paper-03.pdf
|volume=Vol-596
}}
==Linked Open Ontology Services==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-596/paper-03.pdf
Vol-596
urn:nbn:de:0074-596-3
C opyright © 2010 for the individual
papers by the papers' authors.
C opying permitted only for private and
academic purposes. This volume is
published and copyrighted by its
editors.
ORES-2010
Ontology Repositories and Editors for
the Semantic Web
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Ontology Repositories and
Editors for the Semantic Web
Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, May 31st, 2010.
Edited by
Mathieu d'Aquin, The Open University, UK
Alexander García Castro, Universität Bremen, Germany
Christoph Lange, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
Kim Viljanen, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
10-Jun-2010: submitted by C hristoph Lange
11-Jun-2010: published on C EUR-WS.org
Linked Open Ontology Services
Kim Viljanen, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Salonoja and Eero Hyvönen
Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo)
Aalto University, School of Science and Technology, and University of Helsinki
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/, firstname.lastname@tkk.fi
Abstract. Ontology repository systems are used for publishing and
sharing ontologies and vocabularies for content indexing, information
retrieval, content integration, and other purposes. However, interlink-
ing these distributed repositories to provide global search and browsing
over the repositories has not been made. In the spirit of Linked Open
Data, we propose creating a network of Linked Open Ontology Services
(LOOS) consisting of ontology repositories that publish their content
using a shared API. To test the approach, we have defined an HTTP
API and present a proof-of-concept implementation consisting of three
client applications that are used for accessing a LOOS network of over
50 ontology servers, part of the Ontology Library Service ONKI.
1 Introduction
Ontology repositories have been considered a key resource for building a global
infrastructure to enable the vision of the Semantic Web [1]. Many ontology
repository systems exist for publishing and sharing ontologies and vocabular-
ies for content indexing, information retrieval, content integration, and other
purposes, e.g. Cupboard [2], BioPortal [3], OOR [4], and ONKI [5].
However, currently each ontology repository is a separate island, with no con-
nections with other repositories. This means that, e.g. global search, browsing,
or inference over the repositories can not be done, which creates a hindrance
for using the ontologies globally. For example, searching for the concepts with
the label “fish” from all existing ontology repositories around the Internet is cur-
rently not possible although many ontology repositories surely contain ontologies
with matching concepts. Because the user may not find the correct ontology or
concept for one’s needs, it means that:
– the quality of annotations may decrease if the optimal concept is not found,
– redundant new ontologies are created if the existing ontologies are not found,
– interlinking of data decreases due to creating redundant ontologies, and
– merging data for semantic web applications becomes more difficult due to
the need for ontology matching.
As a solution to the problem of how to access the repositories globally, in
the spirit of the Linked Open Data1 [6], we propose a Linked Open Ontology
1
http://linkeddata.org
Services (LOOS) architecture consisting of ontology repositories that publish
their content through common API, and thus making it possible to access the
different ontology services in a distributed way.
In the following, we present the proposed architecture and API. Then, a proof
of concept implementation of clients and servers is described. Finally, related
work is discussed and contributions of the paper summarized.
2 LOOS API and Metadata About Services
The LOOS Network consists of ontology repositories that publish their content
using a common, uniform LOOS API. A key idea of the LOOS API is to hide
the ontology schema specific representations (such as OWL and RDFS) behind a
uniform, simplified, SKOS-like representation of the key elements of the ontology:
the concepts and their relations. Hiding ontological details makes it easier both to
provide a uniform API to the ontologies and to display the search results from the
underlying repositories in a uniform way to the user. After finding the matching
ontology or concept, if the full power of a specific ontology representation is
needed, the user can be directed to the specific ontology repository.
The main methods of the API are following:2
– search: search concepts
– getLabels: get the labels of a concept
– getEquivalentConcepts: get the equivalents of a concept
– getConceptHierarchy: get the concept hierarchy of a concept
– getFullPresentation: get all the information about a concept
– getDirectory: get the directory view of an ontology
The search method is used for finding concepts using various restrictions, such
as text, concept type, or parent concept. The method returns a list of matching
concepts. To get information about each concept, the properties and relations
of a concept can be queried using methods such as getLabels. For efficiency, the
getFullPresentation method returns all information about a certain concept in
a single request. When browsing an ontology, an overview of the ontology is
helpful. To support this, the getDirectory method returns an ontology-specific
overview of the given ontology, consisting of e.g. the alphabetical ordering of the
concept labels, manually defined grouping of concepts, or the top concepts of
the ontology.
We propose implementing the LOOS API as a lightweight, stateless, and
cacheable HTTP GET based API that returns data using the JSON format
which provides an easy way to add LOOS support to ontology servers.
To find LOOS enabled services, metadata about the services is needed. We
use the property loos:APIBaseURL for describing the URL of each LOOS end-
point. Additional information about the ontology such as title and description
may be expressed using e.g. the Dublin Core metadata schema. Based on the
metadata, e.g. a directory of LOOS services can be published.
2
For the complete API documentation, check: http://www.yso.fi/loos/
3 The Proof-of-Concept Implementation
The ONKI SKOS ontology server has been used for publishing over 70 ontologies
in the Finnish Ontology Library Service ONKI [7]. Global search to the ontologies
was however not possible, because the ontologies were running as separate server
instances. To solve this problem, and as a proof-of-concept implementation for
the LOOS aproach, the LOOS API was implemented to the ONKI SKOS server
and the server instances were described with LOOS metadata (see Fig. 1).
Figure 1. The proof-of-concept implementation of LOOS.
Fig. 2. The global LOOS search for “fish” matches many ontologies.
The ONKI2 Browser3 is a global search and browsing user interface for ac-
cessing the LOOS network of ontology servers (the ONKI SKOS servers) in a
uniform way . For example, making a global query to all ontology servers can be
done (see Fig. 2). ONKI2 was mostly implemented using PHP4 .
Another client is the JavaScript-based ONKI Selector widget [8] for adding
ontological concept search to HTML forms which now supports using the LOOS
network as a back-end. As a third client, we implemented also a URI resolver
for dereferencing the end-user’s ontology concept URI requests to a suitable
representation provided via the LOOS network, such as HTML or RDF.
To make client implementation easier, a broker for accessing the LOOS net-
work was implemented. It provides a registry of LOOS enabled ontology servers
based on the ontology service metadata, a single access point for using the LOOS
network and a cache5 to speed up potentially slow HTTP requests to individual
ontology servers. Based on the registry, the broker directs LOOS requests to
relevant back-end ontology servers.
4 Discussion
Compared to more general methods of accessing RDF data, such as SPARQL6
and Linked Data [6], the LOOS approach focuses on ontologies. For example,
when querying for the concept hierarchy of a concept via the LOOS API, one does
not need to know what RDF properties (e.g. rdfs:subClassOf or skos:broader )
are used in the data to express the hierarchical relations between concepts. The
LOOS API restricts the set of possible queries, which makes it easier to imple-
ment and use the API in the ontology servers and the client applications.
APIs for accessing ontologies and vocabularies presented previously include
the SKOS API7 and the OWL API8 . Compared to them, the LOOS API provides
a higher abstraction, independent from specific ontology languages. Compared
to the API’s of BioPortal [3], Swoogle9 and Watson10 , the goal of LOOS is to
create a network of ontology servers based on a shared API that is implemented
by all services. Therefore, the LOOS API focuses on a few basic methods that
reflects the basic functionality of ontology repositories, e.g. concept search. In
future, the LOOS API should be made compatible with repository specific APIs.
Ontology servers such as BioPortal and Cupboard support publishing in-
terlinked ontologies, but the ontologies have to be uploaded into a centralized
service for a global search. In contrast, in the LOOS approach ontologies can be
published using a ontology service that is optimized for the specific ontology and
3
http://www.yso.fi/onki2/?l=en
4
http://www.php.net/
5
As a proxy cache we used Varnish: http://varnish-cache.org/
6
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
7
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/skosapi.html
8
http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/
9
http://swoogle.umbc.edu/
10
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/
the user’s needs while publishing the ontology service’s basic functionality via
the LOOS API to connect the ontology service to a global network of ontology
services.
The loosely coupled LOOS architecture has turned out to be a flexible solu-
tion which makes it easy to implement additional clients when needed. Making
multiple HTTP requests to back-end servers may be slow, but in our test imple-
mentation this lag has not been a problem thanks to the proxy cache between
the clients and the back-end servers.
To conclude, this paper argues that the various ontology servers on the web
should be made accessible using a common API that would provide a simple but
universal methods for accessing the ontology content. As a solution, we propose
the LOOS API and a metadata schema for describing the services.
Acknowledgements This work is part of the National Semantic Web Ontology
project in Finland11 (FinnONTO, 2003-2012), funded mainly by the National
Technology and Innovation Agency (Tekes) and a consortium of 38 organizations.
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11
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