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Swoop is no longer under active development at mindswap. Continuing development can be found on SWOOP's Google Code homepage at http://code.google.com/p/swoop/.
SWOOP - A Hypermedia-based Featherweight
OWL Ontology Editor
News
Motivation
Most existing ontology development toolkits provide an integrated
environment to build and edit ontologies, check for errors and
inconsistencies (using a reasoner), browse multiple ontologies, and
share and reuse existing data by establishing mappings among different
ontological entities. However, their UI design (look & feel) and
usage style are inspired by traditional KR-based paradigms, whose
constrained and methodical framework have steep-learning curves, making
it cumbersome to use for the average web user.
On the other hand, consider a hypermedia inspired ontology editor
that employs a web-browser metaphor for its design and usage.
Such a tool would be more effective (in terms of acceptance and use)
for the average web user by presenting a simpler, consistent and
familiar framework for dealing with entities on the Semantic Web. Based
on this hypothesis, we present our ontology editor - SWOOP, meant
for rapid and easy browsing and development of OWL ontologies.
Features
- Web Browser like look & feel: (see sample screenshots
above)
- An address bar where the URI of the ontology (or
class/property/individual) can be entered directly for loading; hyperlink
based navigation across ontological entities (address bar URL
changes accordingly); history buttons (Back, Next etc) for traversal;
and bookmarks that can be saved for later reference
- Inline Editing
- All ontology editing in SWOOP is done inline with the HTML
renderer, using different color codes and font styles to emphasize
ontology changes, eg. different representations for added axioms vs.
deleted axioms vs. inferred axioms. Undo/redo options are provided with
an ontology change log and a rollback option.
- Designed for OWL Rec.
- Species validation
- Presentation syntax tabs
- Concise Format View
- Abstract Syntax (from OWL API)
- RDF/XML (from BBN HyperDAML)
- Turtle/N3
- (plug-in architecture for new tabs)
- Multiple Ontology Support
- Browsing, Mapping, Comparison
- Advanced Features
- Run "sound and complete" conjunctive
ABox queries (written in RDQL) on an ontology using Pellet
- Partition Ontologies
automatically by transforming them into an E-connection
- Debug mode: By exposing the internal workflow of a
Description Logic Tableaux
reasoner (Pellet) in a meaningful and readable manner, explanations are
provided to help users understand the cause for (and remove)
inconsistencies detected in ontologies.
- Collaborative Annotation Support: An Annotea plugin in
SWOOP allows users to write and share annotations on any ontological
entity (class/ property/ individual). Additionally, ontology change
sets can be attached to the annotation messages for sharing.
Architecture
- Based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm.
- Model
- Loaded ontologies as seen by a reasoner
- Multiple Views
- Ontology, entity, and hierarchy views
- Support rendering + editing
- Plugin based system
- Loads new reasoners and renderers automatically
Future Plans
- Concept Reuse (Search and Merge): A search algorithm has
been designed that combines keywords with DL-based constructs to find
related concepts in existing ontologies. Having found these
concepts/properties in external ontologies, SWOOP would assist the user
in linking to the data using E-Connections
- SMORE (to be released separately)
- DIG Interface for Reasoners
- XMLS (xml:schema -> OWL Ontology converter)
Release Information
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