Re: Tools

Cristian,

sorry, but you must have stumbled upon one of our "teaser paragraphs"
:-) As that paragraph states, most of these are tools that haven't
been released (yet).  These tools are usually developed within one or
more research program to some reasonable level of maturity to allow us
to use them, but then we often lack the time and resources to get them
into releasable shape.  Here is a quick run down with respect to the
ones you mention:

OntoMorph is primarily a programming environment that combines
syntax-based rewrite rules and semantic operations supported by
PowerLoom.  This environment allows an ontological engineer to quickly
write translators and merge ontologies as s/he sees fit.  While I've
written quite a few translators based on OntoMorph, I don't really
advise other people to use it.  It never achieved quite enough
maturity for me to release it to a wider audience (as we did with
PowerLoom), and there is little debugging help (which you'd really
need when writing complex rules and translation systems).  Look at
http://www.isi.edu/~hans/ontomorph/presentation/siframes.html for some
more info.

The Java GUI is in fairly mature shape and just needs a bit of
packaging up and re-testing, since some of the underlying server
infrastructure changed.  We've used it mostly for demo purposes but
not for actually developing ontologies.  This means it would still
have to go through some (extensive?) revisions to make it a really
useful tool.

Of the tools you mention, the Protege plug-in is probably the easiest
for us to distribute, since it is fairly small and in good shape.  If
you are interested, please send mail to Tom Russ.

The `whynot' command is part of the standard PowerLoom release, so you
can use it with any PowerLoom KB and query.  But we warned, this is
still in a very experimental state.  To debug failed Cyc queries
(actually a full Cyc version, not just OpenCyc) PowerLoom was hooked
up to the Cyc KB via a backdoor socket connection and
paged-in/translated (via OntoMorph)/reasoned with Cyc axioms on the
fly.  As you might imagine, this connection was quite complex and did
not survive beyond the end of the particular research project.  Also,
WhyNot debugging is only really useful in KBs that have rules, and I
don't think OpenCyc contains axioms beyond taxonomic relationships, so
I'm not sure it could really help much there.

With respect to ontologies, we only really distribute the ontologies
found in the top-level kbs directory of the PowerLoom release.  There
is a possibility that we'll use OpenCyc in one of our upcoming
research projects, which might prompt us to translate it into
PowerLoom and distribute it if OpenCyc's licensing allows that.

So, to sum up, we do have these tools, but it would take some additional
motivation to get them released.  Ideally, that motivation would come
in form of research dollars by partnering on some of your funded research
projects, but if enough people are asking, we might also be willing to
do some of that on our own nickel :-)  It will take longer that way...

Hans

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Hans Chalupsky, PhD                     USC Information Sciences Institute
Project Leader, Loom KR&R Group         4676 Admiralty Way
<[email protected]>                          Marina del Rey, CA 90292
(310) 448-8745
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>>>>> Cristian A <Cristian> writes:

> I've read that PowerLoom has some very interesting tools like OntoMorph, a java gui, an extension to Protege that allows export in PowerLoom format.
> Also, it appears that PowerLoom's 'WhyNot' feature was used to debug failed OpenCyc queries.
> I would like to know where can I find these tools and the ontologies translated into PowerLoom format (OpenCyc would be very usefull).
> Thank you.