semantic web software - Isis Project No 3567

Research Realises Responsive Reasoner

Isis Innovation, the technology transfer arm of the University of Oxford, releases new software for knowledge-based applications in areas such as life sciences, business processes and the semantic web.

Marketing Opportunity

There is an increasing demand from organisations in all industry sectors to capture detailed domain knowledge (called an ontology), and combine this with data from multiple sources to answer complex questions about the domain of knowledge. At the same time, organisations are seeking to exploit the world-wide web in new ways by analysing the contextual meaning of web content (the semantic web), and using the web as a source of knowledge.

Recognising this need, the World Wide Web Consortium set up a group to standardise the Web Ontology Language (OWL). A software application called a reasoner exploits the knowledge represented in OWL ontologies and data by infering logical consequences and answering specific queries. OWL is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for all knowledge representation applications. It has been used by the developers of several large biomedical ontologies, including

• the BioPAX biological pathway ontology and
• the GALEN medical terminology ontology.

OWL has also found a place in general business activities such as

• sevice management and
• business analytics.

The Oxford Invention

The present generation of semantic reasoners suffers from serious performance problems caused by the number and size of the information structures that they need to construct and consider. HermiT is a new software application which is able to reason over several ontologies, including the original version of the GALEN ontology, that have defeated existing state of the art reasoning systems.

Sortware Status

The software has been developed using the Java programming language. Isis would like to talk to companies interested in licensing this software for use in knowledge representation tools and applications.

A licence to use the software developed at Oxford can be obtained by completing the online licence request form »

 

Please contact the Isis Project manager to discuss this further or visit the software homepage: http://hermit-reasoner.com

Request Further Information: Project Number 3567 Semantic Web Software