Ontaria : Help

About

Ontaria is a searchable directory of semantic web vocabularies, ontologies, and related information. Like most web directories and search engines, its inforation is gathered from other web sites. To request that ontaria examine a specific site, use the add a site page.

This project is still very experimental. It is not yet officially "live", but should be by May 21. It's a W3C SWAD project funded by DARPA DAML.

"Ontaria" is the service; "SemWalker" is the software. SemWalker is open-source (CVS repository); others are free to install and use it subject to the W3C Software License. They can call it a SemWalker installation, but should not call it "Ontaria".

Current Features

Search. Enter words or quoted strings into the Search/Inspect box, and Ontaria will find subjects which are described using that text, or otherwise closely related to it. (Current bug: only the first word is used, and the search does not notice word boundaries, so a search for "tim" will match "time".)

Inspect. Enter a URI, URI-Reference, QName (with a known namespace prefix), or a known namespace prefix (with trailing colon), to display information about the identified thing.

Browse. Lots and lots of links, making it easy to wander around to related information, while staying on site.

Multiple Views. Multiple views may be possible for a given subject. Currently they are listed on tabs. Clicking on a tab brings it to the front (selects that view); the stacking order is preserved during navigation by being encoded in the site URI.

Pre-Loaded Data. Every few days a set of RDF sites are harvested, and the data is gathered into a starting set. Users may request new sites be added.

Features Under Development

Real-Time Harvesting. New URIs encountered in search text should be immediately tried on the web, to gather more information. URIs in returned material should also be followed, if they meet certain weighted-distance limits. Harvesting should obey robots.txt and use HTTP caching, per-host serialization, and conditional retrieval so it minimally impacts harvested sites.

Validation. Content should be examined for syntactic and semantic errors, which can shown to users.

Provenance. All information should be labeled and linked to the source of the information.

Inference. At least RDFS and partial OWL inference should be performed. Provenance on inferences should be explanations/proofs.

Features Being Considered

Shopping Cart. A way for users to indicate which items are of special interest to them, perhaps for aggregation and republication as a new ontology.

On-Site Authoring. Fix typos immediately, when you see them. Or even add new terms, descriptions, etc.