ED2.0 underway

Manuscripts and academentia aside, we want to make E.D. better. To do so, we're planning to take advantage of the FreeBase type-ahead box pictured here.

I've been thinking about some sort of integration with FreeBase since I saw Jamie Taylor's "Stone Soup" presentation at WWW2007 and now the time seems to be ripe. "We" now includes Francois Belleau of bio2rdf fame. Francois is working on integrating bio2rdf with FreeBase and thus taking advantage of, among other things, their extremely fast graph query engine. By embedding the source vocabs (e.g.MeSH, GO..) in FreeBase, we will be able to use their (also extremely fast) type-ahead. This should eliminate the slowness and the memory problems we've had in the current implementation as well as providing a nice way to access ~way more terms. With Francois' work to map back and forth between freebase and RDF, I think this will end up being a much more killer application than v1.0.

Connotea + Semantic Web = E.D.

What do you get when you combine social tagging with terms from web-accessible ontologies?

E.D. the Entity Describer

ED helps people use terms from ontologies* as their connotea tags.
Is it useful, interesting, a total waste of time? I'm not really sure yet, but it seemed like it would be fun. If you have some time, please do give it a try and let me know what you think! Details about installation etc. here

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* Here 'ontology' just refers to any OWL/RDF document. The 'terms' are the rdfs:labels for the classes or the actual class name if the labels are missing. E.D. only "understands" rdfs:label and rdfs:subClassOf. It would make more sense to follow a SKOS model as the only semantics we plan to use are "broader-than" and "narrower-than"; but, since the large majority of OWL ontologies that we are interested in use subClassOf even when they mean skos:narrowerThan , we do the same within E.D. Support for ontologies/thesauri that are encoded with the SKOS ontology will be added as the need arises.