The forerunners of the project

The idea of the project was born after a lot of work for metadata based development. Currently there are a lot of technologies and platforms that provides different Domain Specific Notations to develop business software. Now I’m involved into one such project “Murometz” (www.realbh.ru on Russian only) which is based on the following ideas: 1. Metadata (ontology) is used to describe Domain Entities and they specific relations 2. Generators are used to generate the VB.Net code for: Domain Entities (object model) Representation of Domain Entities (user interface model) 3. Number of services (together they build up a platform “Murometz”) are used to process Domain Entities Security Persistence Search Replication Etc… In the Semantic Web world there are lots of tools for ontology development. And there is obvious that ontologies help program services and agents to understand the sense of information and relations between different resources. Now it’s really important to find a way how bring together ontologies, information resources and services and deliver they common power to end-user and business. First of all it’s necessary to provide every user with possibility to publish and manage his information in an ontology based manner. When amount of such information will get to a critical mass the semantic services and agents will grow extremely. And we’ll have a possibility to take advantages of such services. So this is the major idea.

How this can be done now? Well there is a number of tools that provide user with possibility to create own ontology and to create information resources in terms of such ontologies. I like the Protégé (http://protege.stanford.edu/) tool which is really powerful. But the Protégé is a java program oriented for developers. You should download it before you can add create some resource. Moreover you should deploy your resource to some open area. There is a WEB based project that provides some of Protégé functions on the web (see pOWL project http://powl.sourceforge.net/). The Semantic Links project will provide similar functions but it should be simpler for end-users. Also it should provide powerful functionality oriented to Web developers, service developers and ontology developers.