Holger Knublauch

The protégé OWL plugin: an open development environment for semantic web applications

We introduce the OWL Plugin, a Semantic Web extension of the Protege ontology development platform. The OWL Plugin can be used to edit ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), to access description logic reasoners, and to acquire instances for semantic markup. In many of these features, the OWL Plugin has created and facilitated new practices for building Semantic Web contents, often driven by the needs of and feedback from our users. Furthermore, Proteges flexible open-source platform means that it is easy to integrate custom-tailored components to build real-world applications. This document describes the architecture of the OWL Plugin, walks through its most important features, and discusses some of our design decisions.

OWL Pizzas: Practical Experience of Teaching OWL-DL: Common Errors & Common Patterns

Understanding the logical meaning of any description logic or similar formalism is difficult for most people, and OWL-DL is no exception. This paper presents the most common difficulties encountered by newcomers to the language, that have been observed during the course of more than a dozen workshops, tutorials and modules about OWL-DL and it’s predecessor languages. It emphasises understanding the exact meaning of OWL expressions – proving that understanding by paraphrasing them in pedantic but explicit language. It addresses, specifically, the confusion which OWL’s open world assumption presents to users accustomed to closed world systems such as databases, logic programming and frame languages. Our experience has had a major influence in formulating the requirements for a new set of user interfaces for OWL the first of which are now available as prototypes. A summary of the guidelines and paraphrases and examples of the new interface are provided. The example ontologies are available online.

Capture and Dissemination of Experience about the Construction of Engineering Processes

Process know-how is instrumental to govern engineering processes in a network of engineering departments as well as migrate changes of processes due to emerging technological or other opportunities. In this paper we present a process construction kit for the capture and dissemination of process knowledge at the level of process structures as well as process construction experience. Our approach ranges from the formal capture and maintenance of know-how about processes to the implementation of process adaptations in terms of object-oriented concepts. Requirements are drawn from specific reference applications in the automotive engineering and the plant construction domain.

Tool-supported process analysis and design for the development of multi-agent systems

This paper introduces a methodology for the development of multi-agent systems, in particular multi-agent systems that optimize the collaboration of distributed work groups like clinical departments. A major difficulty with such systems is requirements elicitation, because intimate knowledge of the work processes is needed to identify the potential agent application scenarios. In the face of uncertain requirements, our methodology exploits some ideas from agile software development approaches such as Extreme Programming, namely the values of collaboration with domain experts and of human creativity driven by rapid feedback. We support collaboration by means of a tool-supported modeling approach that allows one to capture existing and agentified processes in a format that is sufficiently simple to be understood and maintained by domain experts. These process models can be automatically synchronized with executable agent source code, so that rapid feedback is ensured. We support creativity by means of a searchable repository of reusable agent design patterns and other types of process modeling knowledge.

The Engineering Process

Engineering highly flexible software systems for real-world applications on the basis of intelligent agents and multiagent systems is a challenging task. Conventional software engineering provides established methodologies and tool support. Additionally, knowledge engineering captures the necessary aspects of integrating knowledge in intelligent agents. However there is still a gap between software and knowledge engineering methodologies. State-of-the-art approaches of agent-oriented software engineering partially integrate these approaches. Nevertheless, challenges for the engineering process of agent technology remain open and therefore are addressed in this section on agent engineering.

Agent-Based Information Logistics

Situated and context-sensitive information logistics surface as decisive requirement for supporting critical care units, because information relevant for patient treatment stems from heterogeneous as well as distributed data sources. Immediate treatment starts with an incomplete and almost empty array of information which fills continuously over time by examinations conducted by organizationally as well as geographically distributed departments. Agent technology and multiagent systems appear as a promising enabling technology to improve information logistics in intensive care units. However, an overall development methodology is required that enables an engineering process from the capture of know-how about clinical processes towards a model-based generation of multiagent systems. This contribution reports on an agile development methodology used for the design, implementation and testing of applications for agent-based information logistics.