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
 Other sample screenshots on the Media Page |
News
- Released new SWOOP v2.3 beta - see downloads (01/04/06)
- Created a new page on the Debugging of OWL
Ontologies using Swoop
- Released SWOOP v2.2 Final - see downloads (03/13/05)
- Added a public SWOOP-devel (Developers) Mailing List (11/24/04)
- Stay updated on SWOOP issues via the MINDSWAP Issue Tracker (10/28/04)
- Added Java
Webstart Demo
- Added SWOOP Movie Demos on the Media page (06/28/04)
- Changed SWOOP License to MPL 1.1
- Released SWOOP v2.0 (05/26/04)
- Created a public SWOOP (Generic Users) Mailing List (05/26/04)
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
- Uses Manchester OWL API
- 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
- Species validation
- 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
- Downloads, SVN information, and nightly builds available on the SWOOP Downloads page.
- Two public SWOOP mailing lists are available: General Swoop (users) and a Technical Swoop (developers)
