About the AIFB SEmantic portAL

Welcome to the SEmantic portAL (SEAL) of the Institute AIFB. Besides regular pages for human consumption, this portal also provides annotated pages which contain machine processable content in form of OWL annotations and additional metadata such as BibTex, VCard, Dublin Core and FOAF.

• SEAL approach (our approach for SEmantic portALs)
• SWRC ontology (the SWRC ontology, includes e.g. issues on engineering of ontologies for portals)

OWL annotations for persons, publications and projects

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL is a W3C Recommendation and facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics.

Throughout the portal information about persons, publications and projects are retrieved from a relational database and presented to the user by XHTML. Such sites are also annotated by machine-understandable descriptions according to the SWRC - Semantic Web for Research Communities ontology (SWRC download). Both XHTML files and annotations are interlinked by the <link rel="meta"> tag. In addition, you may view the automatically generated information by clicking on the "OWL/RDF" button on the bottom of pages about persons, publications or projects.

Let's make an example. We provide regular XHTML pages (XHTML example) for human consumption and OWL annotations (OWL example) for computer processing.

In case you need a larger amount of OWL annotations, e.g. for testing, we also provide the complete OWL annotations of the portal in one ".owl" file (dynamically generated):

Click on the icon to download
the complete annotation (~2 MB .owl file).

The annotations have been successfully tested with OilEd 3.5.7 and Protege 3.0 beta, OWL Plug-In Version 1.3, Build 212. All of them validate correctly against OWL Lite according to the WonderWeb OWL Validator.

Note that we use the OWL DLP (Description Logic Programs) fragment for the annotations, which is a subset of OWL Lite. Its expressivity is equal to Datalog while keeping as much of the Description Logic primitives as possible.

BibTex for publications

For publications we additionally offer BibTex exports (BibTex example).

VCard, Dublin Core and FOAF for persons

For persons we provide additional metadata VCard, Dublin Core, and FOAF. All of them are also generated dynamically.

E.g., for the person Daniel Oberle we provide his VCARD (VCard example), Dublin Core (Dublin Core example) and FOAF (FOAF example) metadata.

Have fun with the AIFB portal!
York Sure

Responsible staff

• York Sure
  Senior Visionary, Project Coordinator
• Denny Vrandecic
  Person in Charge, Portal Management, Python Tamer
• Helena Hartfiel
  Chief Software Engineer

• Daniel Oberle
  Advisory Board Member, Portal Management, Senior President Exports
• Christoph Schmitz
  Senior Zopista and Unix Guru
• Andreas Hotho
  Chief Bug Finder, Tech and Unix Guru
• Raphael Volz
  Project Management, Portal Architect, Chief Zopista
• Nenad Stojanovic
  Legacy Migrator
• Daniel Himmel
  Software Engineer
• Eddie Mönch
  Software Engineer
• Tobias Grzesik
  Software Engineer

This site runs on:

• Apache
  Web Server
• Zope
  Application Server
• PostgreSQL
  Database Server
• mxODBC
  Database Adapter/ Connection Pooling