AI seminar: Ontologies: Mature research tools?

Speaker: Rob Warren

Ontology research has had a renewed interest with the release of two ontological markup standards, DAML+OIL and OWL, in December of 2001 and March of 2002.

In this talk I'll review some of the work I did while at the Fungal Web Project in Montreal, where we faced several questions about the use and adoption of ontologies and their markup languages:

• Have ontologies grown out of 'toy' research applications?
• What are ontologies being used for by organisations?
• How do we build, maintain and integrate them?
• What tools are available? What are the scaling issues?

I'll report on some of our findings concerning ontology use 'in the wild' and talk about highlights from the knowledge-based bioinformatics workshop held earlier this month.

Food: Leila Chinaei