We are pleased to announce that the Hasselt University (Belgium) has recently developed an ontology plug-in.

The ontology plug-in was created by Dimitri Surinx, Jeroen Vaelen and Niki Vandesbosch (students at Hasselt University) in August 2012. The first version was realized under supervision of Dirk Leinders,  ICT Department, and in cooperation with Christophe Dupriez (Destin). The plug-in is very useful as an authority tool in the submission process of any repository, document or content management system.

Characteristics

The ontology plug-in searches multiple thesauri and ontologies  simultaneously by using a web service broker. The broker can be configured to access any web service. At this moment, it searches FAO’s Agrovoc webservice, and an ASKOSI server containing the AGROVOC, ASFA, Plant Ontology, NERC-C19 (An Oceanographic Geographical ontology) ontology, and OceanExpert.

The application has the following technical specifications:

• An ontology server, JAVA – servlet based, that implements the search and browse API by delegating requests to other web services.
• An ontology web client for the user interface which calls the ontology server, using Javascript and JQuery.

Figure 1. The ontology plug-in interface contains history, search and result panel. 

The plug-in can be integrated in external applications, such as metadata submission applications for institutional repositories and library catalogues. The ontology plug-in expects the following configuration parameters: ontologies to search, and relations (e.g., broader, narrower) to show. The ontology plug-in delivers as output a list of selected concepts, where each concept has a URI (or unique ID), a preferred label with optional language definition and the ontology from which the concepts has been selected. The external application can integrate this list of concepts in its workflow.

Although the ontology plug-in was created within the context of AgriOcean DSpace, it is an independent plug-in and can be used in other applications not related to agriculture and aquatic science.

Extra graphical features can be included, e.g. for geographical ontologies or the integration of a visual interface.

The source code is available under an open source Apache License 2.0 at Code available at https://code.google.com/p/ontology-plugin/

Access to the Ontology Plug-in demo at http://193.190.8.15/ontwebapp/ontology.html