Tutorial for EKAW 2004 Title: Introduction to Ontology Development and the Protégé-OWL Environment Speakers: Alan Rector, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge, Robert Stevens, Hai Wang Duration: Half Day with extensive hands on experience and pre- and post- material Description ----------- With the emergence of the Semantic Web, the development of ontologies has moved from Artificial-Intelligence laboratories to the desktops of domain experts. The acceptance of the standard for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the efforts of the Semantic Web Best Practice group, bring with them an urgent need for people to gain experience in practical ontology development and practice. The Protégé tools from Stanford Medical Informatics have a long history of success in the domain of ontology-based system development. The Protégé-OWL plugin with the additional CO-ODE tools is becoming widely used and is arguably the most intuitive interface for OWL development currently available. The tutorial will give participants a chance not only to experience the tools but also to give feedback for their further development. This tutorial will focus on building ontologies in OWL using the Protégé-OWL tools and methodologies embodied in them. It will act as a practical introduction to ontology design, the OWL language itself, particularly OWL-DL, and to the tools and the environment. It will use examples explicitly designed to help attendees understand the modeling issues and to avoid common confusions. The tutorial will provide attendees with hands-on experience with the tools. We plan to have the attendees follow along on their laptops and will have several team members help with these activities during the tutorial. Goals ----- The major goal of this tutorial is to provide the attendees with both the theoretical foundations of ontology design and hands-on experience in the construction of ontologies with Protégé-OWL environment. In particular, the attendees will ˇ Learn the basic principles and application domains of OWL based ontologies using styles developed at Manchester and in the Semantic Web Best Practice Working Party . ˇ Gain hands-on experience with ontology development using the Protégé-OWL tools ˇ Learn how to use the expressive power of OWL and to take advantage of its inferencing capabilities ˇ Evaluate the Protégé-OWL tools and related plugins in the context of the state-of-the-art in ontology engineering, Web-based ontology representation languages and related tools. ˇ Be introduced to the skills needed to participate in the growing community of user/developers of the environment Detailed outline ---------------- ˇ The need for ontologies in the Semantic Web - What is an ontology? What do we use them for? - Use of ontologies in the Semantic Web - Differences between ontologies and object-orientation and between ontologies implemetned in OWL and in traditional frame systems. ˇ Using the Protégé-OWL environment to create ontologies in OWL - Ontology-development methodology and supporting tools and wizards - Simple examples of creating an ontology - How to define classes and relationships between classes - How to define properties and their characteristics - How to create and edit instances (individuals) using Protégé forms - Working with a classifier ˇ The Protégé-OWL platform - Brief introduction to the architecture and building your own Protégé plugins and Wizards - OwlViz and other visualisation tools ˇ Advanced topics as time permits - Working with multiple files (imports) - Using testing facilities - Ontology visualization with OwlViz - Ontology merging and versioning with Prompt ˇ Questions, discussion, feedback - an explicit additional goal of the day is to get further feedback on the new tools to influence their development Justification of why the tutorial is important ---------------------------------------------- Ontologies are at the core of the Semantic Web technologies. With the publication of the OWL standard, at this time, it is critical for members of the community to gain experience with OWL, to put it to use, and to understand its capabilities. Experience shows that OWL is far from intuitive, and there are many common pitfalls for neophytes without guidance. The tutorial team has perhaps unparalleled experience in teaching and developing practical ontologies and terminologies in OWL-DL and a wide range of experience with frame based ontologies. Protégé-OWL and its extensions such as the CO-ODE Plugins are arguably the easiest to use and most widely-used for editing OWL ontologies among the tools available today. The tutorial is specifically designed to help users use the tools to avoid common problems. In addition, we are assembling a growing body of tutorial examples. Many of them are available now, and significantly more will be available by the time of the tutorial. They will also have been used in at least two other tutorials and by many more members of both the Protégé and CO-ODE communities. Background knowledge required and potential attendees The attendees should have some basic familiarity with knowledge representation or domain modeling (e.g., object-oriented modeling with UML). No prior knowledge of OWL or Protégé is required, although users will find it helpful to have at least looked at the most introductory tutorials on the web sites below. Hands-On Activities ------------------- Required Software ----------------- ˇ All participants should download the tutorial software in advance which will be provided at http://www.co-ode.org/resources/tutorials/ekaw2004.html. The website will contain detailed installation instructions. ˇ For late registrants a CD version will be provided - although, due to time constraints, attendees are encouraged not to rely on last minute installation Support Material ---------------- ˇ Tutorial Slides will be handed out ˇ Example ontologies. Pizzas, Sample top ontology.. ˇ Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology N. Noy & D. L. McGuinness Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report 2001-0880 ˇ Protégé-OWL tutorial, available from www.co-ode.org . ˇ FAQs for Protégé-OWL and CO-ODE ˇ Holger Knublauch, Olivier Dameron, Mark A. Musen Weaving the Biomedical Semantic Web with the Protégé OWL Plugin First International Workshop on Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation, Whistler, BC, Canada (2004) ˇ Rector, A., Modularisation of Domain Ontologies Implemented in Description Logics and related formalisms including OWL. in Knowledge Capture 2003, (Sanibel Island, FL, 2003), ACM, 121-128 - available from www.co-ode.org Supporting demonstrators ------------------------ In addition to the speakers, at least two other members of the Protégé-OWL-CO-ODE team will attend to provide support and additional tuition to the attendees so that a close level of individual tuition can be given. About the Speakers ------------------ Alan Rector, MD PhD Address: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Affiliation: Professor of Medical Informatics, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester. Email: rector@cs.man.ac.uk Phone: +44-161-275-6188 Fax +44 161-275-6204 Alan Rector has led work on bio-medical application of ontologies since the PEN&PAD and GALEN programmes began in the late 1980s. His early work on the GRAIL representation language was an important motivation for the development of modern expressive description logics. He now leads the CO-ODE/HyOntUse team developing user-oriented ontology development tools in collaboration with the Protégé team at Stanford. With the advent of the Semantic Web his interests have broadened and he is a member of the W3C Semantic Web Best Practice Working group. He has published widely on the management of large scale terminologies and ontologies. With Ian Horrocks, he teaches an MSc module on ontology development for the Semantic Web and has given numerous workshops and tutorials for both biomedical and more general audiences. Robert Stevens PhD Affiliation: Bioinformatics Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. Email: Robert.stevens@cs.man.ac.uk Phone: +44-161-275-6188 Fax +44 161-275-6251 Robert Stevens has degrees in biochemistry, computational biology and computer science. As a bioinformatician, he sits at the interface between the two domains. He brings this expertise to the use of ontologies to make biological knowledge computationally amenable. He was a key player in the TAMBIS project, that used a description logic based ontology to form a homogenizing layer over distributed and heterogeneous bioinformatics resources. Latterly, he has used DAML+OIL and OWL to provide semantically robust and complete versions of the Gene Ontology. Currently, he has a significant role in the use of ontologies for semantic service description for e-Science middleware in the myGrid project. Robert Stevens has given many tutorials and short courses on DAML+OIL and OWL to both biologists and computer scientists. He has been co-chair of the annual bio-ontologies meeting at ISMB, the premier bioinformatics conference, for the past four years. Additional Team: Chris Wroe - Senior researcher at University of Manchester and main developer of the Gene Ontology Next Generation project and ontologist of the myGrid project. Nick Drummond - CO-ODE development team and authors of Wizards plugin Matthew Horridge - CO-ODE development team and author of OwlViz plugin Hai Wang - CO-ODE Development Team and author of OWL Debugging plugin