Consider the following scenario: A programmer needs to read data from a database via the JDBC interface. The system administrator of the organization provides user name and password, which obviously need to be used in the process. Then, the programmer
1. Searches the entire API for a method call (or calls), which takes a database user name as an input parameter.
2. Has to understand how various API calls should be sequenced in order to go from the connection information all the way to actually receiving data from the database.
If the APIs are not semantically rich (i.e., they contain only syntactic information, which the programmers have to read and interpret), understanding, learning and using an API can be a very time consuming task.
For a discussion of how the application of ideas from the areas of "Knowledge Management" and "Knowledge Representation" -- The enrichment of purely syntactic information of APIs with semantic information -- will allow the computer to perform certain tasks that normally the human programmer has to perform, see
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/aeb/smartapi/smartapi.pdf
A similar semantification of Web services (Ontology-enabled Services) is being widely discussed and implemented today.
See, for example,
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~maksym/pap/Onto-SOA-WAI.pdf
and
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/AICT-ICIW.2006.141
A number of my earlier post have been about Protégé , the popular ontology development tool, and OWL, one of the main ontology languages. To continue that discussion, see
http://www.sandsoft.com/edoc2004/KnublauchMDSW2004.pdf
which discusses a realistic application scenario -- some initial thoughts on a software architecture and a development methodology for Web services and agents for the Semantic Web. Their architecture is driven by formal domain models (ontologies).
Central to their design is Jena, a Java framework for building Semantic Web applications. It provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine.
Jena is open source and grown out of work with the HP Labs Semantic Web Programme.
For more on Jena, see
http://jena.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
Jena is a programming toolkit that uses the Java programming language. While there are a few command-line tools to help you perform some key tasks using Jena, mostly you use Jena by writing Java programs.
But, .NET developers have similar resources. See, for example
http://www.ic.uff.br/~esteban/files/sbgames09_Alex.pdf
for a development environment using Microsoft Visual Studio, the base language C#, and the graphical library XNA. Protégé has been used for designing the ontology, and the application uses the OwlDotNetApi library.
This 2009 work demonstrates a step-by-step implementation, from the definition of an ontological knowledge base to the implementation of the main classes of a strategy game. It aims at serving as a basic reference for developers interested in starting .NET development of ontology-based applications.
