OR2012 Developer Challenge:
Dusting Off The Mothballs

Our idea is demonstrated using temporal ontology that models evolution of university’s faculties over time. Faculties are established, merged, split and renamed over the course of history. All this data is captured in an ontology.

Service imports data from triple store. How the triple store is populated is out of the scope of the service. One possible solution is use something like Semantic Media Wiki for collaborative ontology creation.

In our example, the service takes in information about the changes in faculties and transforms that to an efficient index/storage for query expansion. Service provides plugin architecture that allows one to configure different kind of handler implementation for different ontologies (for example SKOS vocabularies).

This service is part of a bigger picture of using and providing Linked Open Data. In addition to the systems for maintaining ontologies, as mentioned above, repositories should start creating links to resources instead of plain strings.