Ontology Engineering and Plug-in Development with the NeOn Toolkit

Our tutorial targets ontology modelers and engineers. The tutorial provides guidance for the development of ontologies and ontology-based applications with respect to the complete ontology lifecycle. We will start with an introduction to a variety of use cases for applications of ontologies, including information integration and knowledge management. Based on these use cases we will illustrate a typical ontology lifecycle and discuss specific ontology lifecycle activities, such as ontology development, selection and reuse, ontology mapping, and ontology evolution. After a short introduction to the NeOn toolkit and its functionalities, we will take a closer look at how the lifecycle activities are realized using the NeOn toolkit. As an example, we will demonstrate how to support ontology selection and reuse with a plug-in that integrates with the Watson Semantic Web gateway. In the hands-on exercises, the participants will work on practical activities from a real world use case. In the second half of the tutorial, we will demonstrate how to extend the functionalities of the ontology engineering environment by developing a NeOn plug-in to support an additional lifecycle activity from the initial use case. Therefore, we first provide further insights into the NeOn reference architecture, its plug-in concept and APIs. We will then demonstrate how to develop a plug-in in an easy-to-follow step-by-step way. After that, the participants will create their own working plug-in in a hands-on exercise.