Some Ongoing KBS/Ontology Projects and Groups

Quick Index: [ A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | VWXYZ ]

If you are working on or know of related work not mentioned here, please email me (peterc@allenai.org)

Other useful Ontology and KR collections include:

• Stuart Russell's AI on the Web
• WPI's Webliography (on AI in Design)
• Roberto Navigli's collection of linguistic databases and resources

Knowledge-Base Projects, Groups, and Related Material

A

• The Air Traffic Services (aviation) Ontology, part of a larger knowledge management program by the FAA.
• Algernon - (Univ. Texas at Austin). A frame-based knowledge representation language using access-limited logic for inference.
• Artificial Memory - A long-term cognitive and tech experiment for enabling Augmented Cognitive Computing (Dr. Lars Ludwig, artificialsoft.com)
• AskJeeves - A question-answering Web search engine.
• AURA - Automated User-Centered Reasoning and Acquisition System. A knowledge acquisition tool for allowing domain experts to build and query scientific knowledge bases themselves. Developed by SRI International, UT Austin, the Boeing Company, and Carnegie-Mellon University, as part of Project Halo (Vulcan Inc.).

B

• The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) - An upper ontology in support of domain ontologies developed for scientific research. BFO grew out of a philosophical orientation which overlaps with DOLCE and SUMO.
• The BRICO Ontology - combines WordNet, Roget's Thesaurus, and the top-level of the Cyc ontology (MIT Media Lab).
• WordsEye - a Natural Language Understanding system that converts English text into three-dimensional scenes that represent that text.
• The Buffalo Ontology Site - Pointers to the philosophy, history, and some computational work in ontologies.
• BPMO - The Business Process Management Ontology - an integrated information model which helps to better align IT with business, bringing together business process design, project management, requirements management, and business performance management (from Jenz & Partner, GmBH).

C

• Carter - (Postscript paper). A (now defunct) tool for assisting experts in agreeing on what should go into a consensus knowledge base. This paper was eventually published as: Trice A, Davis R, "Heuristics for reconciling independent knowledge bases", Information Systems Research, 4 (3), pp262-288, Sept 1993.
• The Cell Cycle Ontology - An integrated ontology of cell cycle knowledge, in OBO and OWL (Computational Biology Division, VIB/Ghent University, Belgium).
• Chimaera - a software system that supports users in creating an maintaining ontologies, in particular merging multiple ontologies together and diagnosing individual or multiple ontologies (KSL, Stanford).
• CIA World Factbook - a popular resource for building a world-savvy KB.
• CKML - Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language. An application of XML and an extension of OML.
• CLIPS - A public domain, expert system shell written in C. Also see the (non-public-domain) successor JESS.
• CommonSense Reasoning - See the Common Sense Problem Page. Also see Cyc, OpenMind.
• The Common Sense Problem Page - A list of benchmark problems in commonsense reasoning.
• CommonKADS - A comprehensive knowledge engineering methodology. See also:
  • Integral Solutions Ltd - development of AI/KBS tools, including sale and support of the CommonKADS WorkBench, and involvement in the KACTUS project.
• Common Logic (CL) Standard - a new (2003) attempt to define a (ISO) standard language and semantics for use in Ontology and Knowledge Engineering. Also see earlier work on KIF.
• Common Logic Controlled English - a formal language with an English-like syntax (by John Sowa).
• The Component Library (CLib) - a knowledge base of formally represented, general, domain-independent concepts (Univ Texas at Austin), represented in the KM knowledge representation language.
• ConceptNet (also browse the data here) - A freely available commonsense knowledge base and natural language processing toolkit, generated automatically from the 1,000,000 sentences (as of 2010) of the Open Mind Common Sense Project.
• Concept Maps - A graphical notation for organizing and representing knowledge in an informal way. Also see this introduction to Concept Maps. For some examples, see the IHMC CMap Tools page (view with Internet Explorer) and the Graphic Organizer Concept Maps page. Also see Topic Maps and Mind Maps.
• Conceptual Dependency - A summary of Roger Schank's conceptual primitives for representing simple sentences.
• Conceptual Grammar (TM) - A hierarchical knowledge base management system (KBMS) bundled with the VisualText (R) integrated development environment (IDE) and NLP++ (R) programming language (from Text Analysis International).
• Conceptual Graphs - Researchers using Peirce/Sowa's conceptual graphs theory for knowledge representation.
  • Tools for Conceptual Graphs (Wikipedia entry)
  • Online Course in Knowledge Representation using Conceptual Graphs (by Ulrik Petersen, Univ Aalborg)
  • CG Shorthand - Notes on a Visual Shorthand for Conceptual Graphs (Robert McNally)
  • The CG Standard.
  • Harry Delugach's Conceptual Structures homepage.
  • CharGer - A CG visual editor, running under a Java VM.
• Contexts - Univ. Maine's collection of pointers.
• Controlled Languages - Rolf Schwitter's collection of pointers.
• CRACK - A description logic with an on-line, Web-based interface (from IRST, Italy).
• CYC - A massive ongoing effort to formalize common-sense knowledge. An open source version is now available as OpenCyc, including (parts of) the ontology, axioms, inference engine, and knowledge acquisition tools.
• CycL - the representation language of CYC.

D

• DAML - DARPA Agent Markup Language. A DARPA program to develop a language and tools to facilitate the concept of the semantic web.
• DAML-S - The DAML Services ontology for specifying Web-based services (e.g., for ecommerce applications).
• DART - Discovery and Aggregation of Relations in Text. Large-scale extraction of general knowledge from text (Boeing Research).
• The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort - See Knowledge Sharing Effort (DARPA).
• Description Logics. Also see the DL systems CRACK. FaCT, LOOM, PowerLOOM, and RacerPro. Also see the Description Logic Handbook (book).
• Design Patterns - Repository of reusable, object-oriented programming abstractions. Also see Gamma et als book on Design Patterns and this page on Software Patterns.
• DLML - A Description Logic Markup Language (Jerome Euzenat, INRIA, France)
• DOLCE - a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering, from the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), Italy.

E

• ECOR - the European Centre for Ontological Research (Saarland University, Germany)
• The eHealth Ontology Project - promoting ways in which in which scientific methods in ontology can bring benefits to healthcare (by a partnership of IFOMIS, ECOR, and RIDE).
• Electronic Lexical Knowledge Base - software for accessing and exploring Roget's thesaurus, including tools for detecting lexical chains; calculating semantic distance; and clustering words.
• The Enterprise Ontology - a collection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises (AIAI, Edinburgh, UK).
• EPILOG - (Episodic Logic). Len Schubert et al.'s knowledge representation language, for use in natural language processing.
• EXPECT - an environment for developing knowledge-based systems that includes knowledge acquisition tools to extend and modify KBs (ISI, Los Angeles).

F

• FaCT - An optimized, tableaux-based DL (Ian Horrocks, Manchester, UK)
• F-Logic - A novel formalism that accounts in a clean and declarative fashion for most of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages.
• FLORA - An object-oriented KB language and application development platform. The programming language supported by FLORA is a dialect of F-logic with numerous extensions, which include a natural way to do meta-programming in the style of HiLog and logical updates in the style of Transaction Logic.
• FLORID - A deductive, object-oriented database system employing F-logic as data definition and query language; FLORID has been extended for handling semistructured data in the context of Information Integration from the Web.
• FrameNet - "an online lexical resource for English". Contains an extensive, semantic analysis of verbs and their case-frame representations. Also see (independent project) WordNet.
• FRDCSA (also see here) - An organization supporting programmers of the Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) revolution. FRDCSA's goal is to assemble the most comprehensive ontology of FLOSS applications, and make packages available for every free operating system, distribution and hardware platform.
• FreeBase - "an open shared database of the world's knowledge," and "a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data." Developed by MetaWeb Technologies.

G

• GandrKB - (Gene Annotation Data Representation KB, available free of charge) - an ontological framework for laboratory-specific gene annotation. Gandr uses Protege 2000 for editing, querying, and visualizing microarray data and annotations. Genes can be annotated with provided, newly created, or imported ontological concepts. Annotated genes can inherit assigned concept-properties and can be related to each other. The resulting knowledgebase can be visualized as interactive network of nodes and edges representing genes and their functional relationships. (Daniel Schober, Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, Germany)
• The Gene Ontology (GO) - a controlled vocabulary that can be applied to all organisms even as knowledge of gene and protein roles in cells is accumulating and changing.
• GALEN - Generalized Architecture for Languages, Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine. GALEN is a medical terminology server for supporting the development of clinical coding schemes.
• The Generalized Upper Model -- a linguistically motivated ontology that supports NL processing; a multilingual outgrowth of the Penman Upper Model.
• The Generic Frame Protocol - not a language, but a standardized set of low-level access functions for frame-based KR systems. GFP has been recently renamed as OKBC (The Open knowledge Base Connectivity Protocol).
• The Generic Knowledge-Base Editor - a graphical KB editor, implemented in Lisp+CLIM, from SRI. Supports the Generic Frame Protocol.
• The Groningen Meaning Bank - A free, semantically annotated corpus, consisting of public domain English texts with corresponding syntactic and semantic representations.

H

• Halo - a long-term, knowledge-based research program aimed at developing inference-capable applications which can acquire knowledge directly from domain experts and other users, answer novel questions, and solve advanced problems (Vulcan Inc.). Also see AURA, developed under this program.
• HIRO - the Health Incident and Reporting Ontology, developed by the company Language and Computing.
• HOMER - An "intelligent agent" integrating many aspects of AI, operating in a (simulated) microworld for unmanned submarines.
• HowNet - An on-line, common-sense KB for multilingual Natural Language Processing. It contains inter-conceptual relations and inter-attribute relations as connoted in Chinese lexicons and their English equivalents. (Also see this overview).
• HPKB - DARPA's High-Perforance Knowledge Base program, an initiative in constructing large-scale, knowledge-based systems. This program finished in 2000, with the follow-up RKF program now underway.
• HTW - The How Things Work project at Stanford; use of a KB and interactive explanation facilities (through WWW) to assist understand/manage/etc. engineered products.

I

• ICOM - A CASE tool for Intelligent Conceptual Modeling (Univ Manchester, UK).. It includes handling of multiple E-R diagrams, and logical specification verification.
• IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group - see Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group.
• IFOMIS - The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (Saarland University, Germany).
• Inference Engines: See Languages and Inference Engines for knowledge representation
• InfoQuilt - A research project that support human-directed knowledge discovery in a multi-ontology, multi-agent environment.
• Internet Business Logic - Writing and running English business rules with unlimited vocabulary, using a browser. Automatic generation and execution of SQL. (from Reengineering LLC).

J

• JESS - Java Expert System Shell. JESS is a rule engine and scripting environment, originally inspired by the CLIPS expert system shell.
• JOE - Java Ontology Editor (Center for IT, Univ South Carolina). Based on entity-Relation diagrams. Will read ontologies stored in KIF format.
• Jumper - a set of semantic tools for aggregating and managing biological data, supporting knowledge base development, semantic integration, linked data, query routing, and auditing & tracking. From Jumper Networks Inc.

K

• KA2 - The Knowledge Annotation Initiative by (and of) the Knowledge Acquisition Community:
  • The community web portal for accessing this knowledge.
  • OntoBroker - the underlying system for ontology-based services.
• KACTUS - An interactive environment for browsing, editing and managing ontologies (Univ Amsterdam).
• KADS: See CommonKADS.
• KAON - The KArlsruhe ONtology and Semantic Web infrastructure, an open-source ontology management infrastructure targeted for business applications. It includes a comprehensive tool suite allowing easy ontology creation and management, as well as building ontology-based applications.
• Knowledge Acquisition Tools: See
  • AURA
  • EXPECT
  • Shaken
  and additional systems under Ontology Building Tools.
• Knowledge Extraction Systems: There are many, but some interesting ones performing large-scale extraction from text include:
  • DART (Boeing Research)
  • KNEXT (Univ Rochester)
  • Prismatic (IBM, not public domain)
  • Read The Web (Carnegie-Mellon Univ)
  • TextRunner (Univ Washington)
  • Probase (Microsoft Research, China)
• KIF - Knowledge Interchange Format: A proposed, logic-based format for exchanging knowledge between computer programs (more details here). Also see the newer effort on the ISO Common Logic standard.
• KM - the Knowledge Machine. A frame-based knowledge knowledge representation language from the University of Texas at Austin, the Boeing Company, used for several projects including Project Halo.
• KNEXT - Knowledge Extraction from Text. Large-scale extraction of general world knowledge by abstracting sentence parses (Univ Rochester).
• Knowledge Management - "A range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences" (Wikipedia). For some pointers, see Best of the Web - Knowledge Management.
• The Knowledge Sharing Effort (DARPA) and related work. A large, collaborative project to research and promote knowledge-base reuse.
  • email archive (email exchanges)
  • KIF - Knowledge Interchange Format: A proposed, logic-based format for exchanging knowledge between computer programs.
• KSL - Stanford's Knowledge Systems Lab; doing extensive, pionering research in knowledge representation, reuse, and sharing.

L

• Laboratory for Applied Ontology (Italy) - a new (2002) laboratory resulting from the fusion of two former groups LADSEB-CNR and ITBM-CNR.
• Language and Computing - A technology company active in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, developing solutions combining Natural Language Processing and the use of ontologies. The company has developed an expansive medical knowledge base called LinKBase, and is developing HIRO, the Health Incident and Reporting Ontology.
• Languages and Inference Engines for Knowledge Representation:
  • For description logic languages, see Description Logics.
  • For conceptual graph tools, see Conceptual Graphs.
  • For other languages, see Algernon, CycL, EPILOG, F-Logic, KM, and SNePS.
  • In addition, the theorem proving/ automated reasoning community have developed numerous theorem provers operating on representations expressed in standard first-order logic syntax (e.g., see here).
• LOOM - a description logic (ISI, CA). Also see its successor PowerLOOM, and Bob MacGregor's Retrospective on LOOM
  • The Ontosaurus - a Web-based interface to LOOM.
  • SHELTER - "SHELTER is intended to offer an environment for collaborative, team development of large knowledge based systems in a manner facilitating sharing and reuse.". Uses LOOM as it's underlying representation language.
• LSDIS Lab - The Large-Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab (Univ Georgia). Doing extensive research and education on the Semantic Web.

M

• Marine Metadata Interoperability Project (MMI) - "Promoting the exchange, integration and use of marine data through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility.". Also see MMI's activities: VOC2OWL, VINE,
• Medical Terminologies and Ontologies: See
  • The eHealth Ontology Project
  • GandrKB (Gene Annotation Data Representation KB)
  • The Gene Ontology (GO)
  • HIRO (Health Incident and Reporting Ontology)
  • UMLS and MeSH
  • Medical Terminology Resources (a collection of pointers).
  • Medical Nomenclatures - some searchable, online databases (in French).
• Mental Causation - See The New Ontology of the Mental Causation Debate.
• MeSH - The National Library of Medicine's subject thesaurus, also a principle component vocabulary of UMLS. Try out the MeSH browser!
• The Meteor Project - researching Semantic Web services and their composition.
• Mikrokosmos - An in-depth, broad coverage ontology for multilingual NLP from the Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University.
• Mind Maps - Informal graphical notation for representing information (e.g., see How to Create a Mind Map). Some similarities to Concept Maps and Topic Maps. Also see Nelements.
• MindNet - Microsoft's knowledge representation project that uses a broad-coverage parser to build semantic networks from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and free text. (Browse a MindNet KB built from word definitions).
• Mizoguchi Lab - Japan. Some interesting papers and ontologies.
• Moby - A public domain suite of lexical resources (word lists, part-of-speech lists, thesaurus, etc.). See here for a quick summary.
• Multiple Ontologies - see Ontologies - Dealing with multiple ontologies.

N

• NASA's Thesaurus - covering aerospace (available for a nominal fee).
• Natural Language Processing tools - By no means a complete list.
  • NLTK - Natural Language Toolkit (Open Source Licence)
• Building/using KBs via natural-language processing (NLP) techniques: See START, and MindNet.
• Nelements - a generic 3-dimensional knowledge representation/knowledge management system (you can think of it as a 3-dimensional mind-mapping tool).

O

• ODE - The Ontology Design Environment (Univ Madrid, Spain). See here also.
• OIL - Ontology Interchange Language. A proposed standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies, drawing together ideas from Web languages (e.g., XML, RDF), Description Logics, and frame-based systems.
• OKBC - The Open Knowledge Base Connectivity Protocol (formerly called GFP, the Generic Frame Protocol). Not a language, but a standardized set of low-level access functions for frame-based KR systems.
• OK Station (in French) - The Ontological Knowledge Station, a commercial modeling tool dedicated to the acquisition, definition and manipulation of knowledge bases and ontologies, based on the OK ontological model (Univ Savoie, France).
• OMCSNet - A semantic network derived from the OpenMind commonsense database, now superceded by the more recent OpenMind derivative knowledge base ConceptNet.
• ON9 - The ontology library at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (Italy), developed using the ONIONS methodology and implemented in Loom.
• ONIONS - a methodology for building a library of generic ontologies, and generating domain ontologies (the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Italy).
• OntoBroker - A system using ontologies for both annotating Web documents, and providing ontology-based answering services. OntoBroker is being used as part of the KA2 initiative
• OntoEdit - An Ontology Engineering Workbench. OntoEdit is a development environment for design, adaptation and import of knowledge models for application systems.
• ONTOGEO - The Geospatial Ontology Research Group in the National Technical University of Athens. This is a repository for the research and teaching activities of the OntoGeo Group in Geographic Information Science, addressed primarily to researchers.
• Ontolingua - a language and set of tools for ontology development (from Stanford). Includes a Sharable Ontology Library.
• ONTOLOG - an open, international, virtual community of practice on ontologies.
• Ontology - Definitions and perspectives
  • What is ontology? (from Ontology Works)
• Ontologies: History and Philosophy - See:
  • Ontologies (Descriptive and Formal Ontologies) - A collection of bibliographies on leading ontologists from Nineteenth Century to our days and a discussion of some philosophical problems related to ontology (by Raul Corazzon).
  • The Buffalo Ontology Site
• The ANSI Ad Hoc Group on Ontology Standards
• Ontologies - examples and collections (also see Thesauri). See
  • Air Traffic Services (aviation) Ontology (from the FAA)
  • BFO - Basic Formal Ontology (an upper ontology)
  • BPMO - The Business Process Management Ontology
  • The Component Library (CLib) - A knowledge-base of formally represented, general concepts.
  • The Cell Cycle Ontology
  • CYC
  • DAML-S The DAML Services ontology.
  • DOLCE - a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering.
  • The eHealth Ontology Project
  • The Enterprise Ontology (for business enterprises)
  • Ontologies for ethology (animal behavior), in particular for the Loggerhead Turtle
  • GandrKB (Gene Annotation Data Representation KB)
  • The Gene Ontology (GO)
  • FrameNet (lexical reference)
  • FreeBase - "database of all the world's knowledge", collaboratively built.
  • the Generalized Upper Model (for NLP)
  • HIRO (Health Incident and Reporting Ontology)
  • Linguistic ontologies and resources - Roberto Navigli's collection
  • various medical terminologies
  • Mental Causation
  • Mikrokosmos (for NLP)
  • MindNet (derived from NLP on dictionaries)
  • the Ontolingua Ontology Library
  • The OpenMind database and the ConceptNet knowledge base derived from it
  • PharmGKB - the Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base
  • PSL (process specification)
  • QUDT (Quantities, units, dimensions, and types)
  • RCC-8 (qualitative spatial reasoning)
  • SENSUS (for NLP)
  • discussions for an IEEE Standard Upper Ontology
  • STEP (for product data exchange)
  • SUMO (the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology)
  • the Twente Ontology Collection
  • VerbNet a semantically rich verb lexicon
  • The Verb Semantics Ontology
  • WebKB-2 (a lexically oriented KB, includes a "tidied up" version of WordNet 1.7)
  • WikiTaxonomy - extracted from Wikipedia
  • WordNet (lexical reference)
  • YAGO (a large semantic knowledge base)
• Ontology Building Tools - For building and managing ontologies. See Michael Denny's survey of ontology editors (2002), and also the following specific tools:
  • Chimaera
  • EXPECT
  • the Generic Knowledge-Base Editor
  • JOE (Java Ontology Editor)
  • Jumper (for biological data)
  • KAON
  • KACTUS
  • OntoEdit
  • Ontosaurus
  • Protege
  • Sigma
  • Shaken
  • Snobase
  • VINE - A tool to map ontologies
  • WordMap
  and additional systems under Knowledge Acquisition Tools.
• Ontology Learning Tools - Automated/assisted techniques for building an ontology. Also see a good survey of ontology learning methods and techniques (OntoWeb deliverable 1.5, A. Gomez-Perez, D. Manzano-Macho).
• The New Ontology of the Mental Causation Debate - an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded research project, attempting to frame the debate with more metaphysical precision, and explore the consequences of that reframing (Univ Durham, UK).
• Ontology Merging Tools - See Chimera and PROMPT. Also see Carter, a tool for helping experts build a consensus KB.
• Ontologies - Dealing with multiple ontologies - See InfoQuilt.
• Ontology Works - Ontology Works is a leading source of ontology construction software, ontology-based database software, and ontology-based information integration software. The Ontology Works IODE is software designed to produce ontologies - true-to-the-world information models. These models may be implemented in the Knowledge Server and High-Performance Knowledge Server. (Also see their page What is ontology?)
• OntologyStream Inc. - a Virginia-based company focused on incorporating knowledge science and technology into eGovernment and intelligence applications.
• Ontosaurus - a Web-based interface to LOOM.
• OntoWeb - Ontology-based information exchange for knowledge management and electronic commerce. A collaborative network of European researchers and industrials, which aims to strengthening the European influence on Semantic Web standardisation efforts such as those based on RDF and XML.
• OpenCyc - The open source version of the Cyc technology (including selected parts of the ontology, axioms, inference engine, and knowledge acquisition tools). Public OpenCyc servers.
• The OpenMind Initiative - a collection of projects to develop "intelligent" software. Note in particular OpenMind CommonSense (below).
• OpenMind CommonSense - A web site for collecting "commonsense" knowledge, as English sentences, en masse from people on the Web. The database can be downloaded for free. Also, a semantic network/knowledge base called ConceptNet mined from this corpus is available. (Also see Push Singh's homepage).

P

• Pangloss and Penman - natural language projects at USC Information Sciences Institute. The creation and use of large ontologies forms a key component of this research.
• Panlingua - A universal theory of linguistic structure (by Chaumant Devin).
• The PARKA Project - a frame-based AI system which claims to scale to extremely large KB applications (Univ Maryland at College Park).
• PharmGKB - The Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base - an integrated resource about how variation in human genes leads to variation in our response to drugs.
• PowerLOOM - A KL-ONE-style knowledge representation language (the successor of LOOM).
• Probase - Large-scale ontology and fact extraction from the Web, including measures of certainty (Microsoft Research, China)
• PROMPT - An interactive ontology merging tool. Part of Protege-2000.
• Protege - An extensible KR tool for constructing ontologies, customizing knowledge-acquisition forms, and entering domain knowledge.
• PSL - The Process Specification Language Ontology.

Q

• QuALiM - A corpus-based QA system at Edinburgh, searching Wikipedia for answers (not just page hits).
• QUDT - Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and Data-Types - A unified model of measurable quantities, units, and their values (Being developed by TopQuadrant and NASA)
• Question-Answering Systems: See AnswerBus, Halo (knowledge-based question-answering), START (NLP), TRAINS and TRIPS (NLP + interactive planning), AskJeeves (Web search), QuALiM (Wikipedia text search), TextMap (TREC/Web search, ISI), and Webclopedia (NLP and information retrieval).

R

• RacerPro - an OWL reasoner and inference server for the Semantic Web.
• RCC-8 - Region Connection Calculus - An ontology for qualitative spatial reasoning.
• RDF - Resource Description Framework: A lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Semantic Web.
• Read The Web (NELL - Never-Ending Langauge Learning) - continuous crawling of the Web to extract an ontology of concepts, facts about those concepts, and confidences in those facts. From Carnegie-Mellon University.
• RIDE - A Roadmap for Interoperability of eHealth Systems (a European-funded project).
• RKF - DARPA's Rapid Knowledge Formation project, developing methods to allow Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to construct knowledge bases directly (1999-2004).
• Roget's Thesaurus
  • Prolog version of Roget's Thesaurus from Arun Majumdar, Stanford CSLI.
  • ELKB - Software for accessing and exploring Roget's Thesaurus.
  • The 1911 Version online - part of the ARTFL project.

S

• The Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) Working Group - working towards the mechanization of Business Process Management by using Semantic Web techniques, especially Semantic Web Services.
• The Semantic Enterprise - (Amit Sheth's graduate course).
• The Semantic Web - A vision of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used not just for display purposes, but also in various applications by machines. Also see:
  • TRIPLE, FLORA, Meteor, and work by LSDIS.
  • KAON - The KArlsruhe ONtology and Semantic Web infrastructure.
  • Amit Sheth's graduate course on the Semantic Web
  • Two one-minute overviews (posters) on The Semantic Web and
  • RDF
  • The Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) Working Group
  • VOC2OWL - a tool to create OWL ontologies from ASCII files.
• SENSUS from ISI, Los Angeles. A large concept taxonomy for natural language processing and other applications.
• Shaken - A knowledge acquisition and reasoning tool built by the SRI Team, as part of DARPA's Rapid Knowledge Formation project. (Contact chaudhri@ai.sri.com for access to the software itself).
• SHOE - HTML extensions to allow knowledge-representation semantics to be added to Web pages, using explicit user-defined ontologies. See also its successor CKML.
• Sigma Knowledge Engineering Tool - An environment for developing, viewing and debugging theories in first order logic.
• Simple Dictionary - A dictionary using a 430 word defining language, or Interlingua, which also serves as the foundation for SIMPLE, a semantically-based NLP system. (Inspired by Ogden's Basic English).
• SMDF - The Shared Meanings Design Framework (in a very early stage, as of August 2000). An HCI-centered methodology for supporting e-commerce developers, by focussing on the semantics which an interface transmits. Uses SMML (Shared Meanings Markup Language).
• SNePS - The Semantic Network Processing System, a knowledge representation and reasoning system from Univ at Buffalo, NY.
• Snobase - IBM Ontology Management System (also known as SNOBASE, for Semantic Network Ontology Base) is a framework for loading ontologies from files and via the Internet and for locally creating, modifying, querying, and storing ontologies.
• The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group - working to specify a standardized upper ontology. Also see SUMO (the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology).
• Stanford KSL - Stanford's Knowledge Systems Lab. Doing extensive, pionering research in knowledge representation, reuse, and sharing.
• The START natural language question-answering system (Infolab, MIT). Matches questions with hand-written annotations on paragraphs.
• Statistical NLP - A web site for a course, including reports, books, tools, and data collections.
• STEP/PDES - Standard for Exchange of Product Data. A huge, international effort to create an interlingua for exchanging manufacturing product data. See also STEP Tools, Inc.
• SUMO - The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, developed within the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group. Contains (as of December 2003) about 1000 terms and over 4200 assertions for general ontological concepts such as temporal relations, spatial relations, activities and roles. Also see:
  • Loom 4.0 translation of a subset of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology.
  • Public ontologies for ecommerce (DAML-S) built on SUMO.

T

• TAMBIS - (Transparent Access to Multiple Biological Information Sources). TAMBIS is an integration and retrieval system for bioinformatics resources, using an extensive ontology.
• TextRunner - Large scale knowledge (taxonomy and facts) extraction from the Web - (Univ Washington).
• TCM - Toolkit for Conceptual Modelling. A collection of software tools to present conceptual models of software systems in the form of diagrams, tables, trees, and the like.
• Thesauri:
  • The Web Thesaurus Compendium - Pointers to many thesauri.
  • Moby - includes a Thesaurus of 30,000 words and 2.5 million synonyms and related words. And it's public domain!
  • Canadian Thesaurus of Construction Science and Technology
  • Roget's Thesaurus
  • NASA's Aerospace Thesaurus
• Topic Maps: A graphical representation of the topics an information set is about, their interrelationships, and which part of an information set are relevant to which topics. Also see Concept Maps and Mind Maps.
  • InfoLoom - various samples, presentations, FAQs, and pointers.
  • ISO/IEC FCD 13250:1999 - The ISO standard for Topic Maps.
• The TOVE project and ontologies, from the Enterprise Integration Lab , Univ Toronto.
• Trellis - An interactive environment allowing users to add their observations, viewpoints, and conclusions as they analyze information (ISI). Also see this paper).
• TRIPLE - an RDF query, inference, and transformation language for the Semantic Web.
• Twente Ontology Collection -- (Univ Twente, Netherlands). On Ceramics, substances, and engineering design. This page no longer seems to be available.

U

• UMLS - Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). A collection of around 60 different biomedical vocabularies, unified/aligned into a single thesaurus, lexicon, and semantic network. Also see MESH, one of UMLS's principle component vocabularies.
• UT Austin - KBS Group - Work on large-scale, multifunctional knowledge-bases.

VWXYZ

• The VAC System - A complex, knowledge-based strategy and software tool for vehicle development (by the automotive company IAV). An animated visualization is available.
• VerbNet - A semantically rich, class-based verb lexicon (U. Penn).
• the Verb Semantics Ontology - build on IBM's Verb Ontology, a database of senses, subcategorizations, roles etc. for high-frequency verbs.
• VINE - Vocabulary INtegration Environment - A tool to map ontologies (from the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project)
• VOC2OWL - a tool to create OWL ontologies from ASCII files (from the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project)
• Webclopedia - an automated, retrieval-based question-answering system (ISI).
• WebGrid-II A Web-based knowledge elicitation tool, implementing repertory grids, from the Knowledge Science Institute, Univ Calgary, Canada.
• WebKB-2 - A large-scale, lexically-oriented (WordNet-like) knowledge-base + Web-based interface. The WebKB-2 knowledge-base includes a "tidied up" version of WordNet 1.7 (see here for details). The WebKB-2 interface allows users to retrieve, re-use, complement, annotate and be guided by other users' knowledge.
• WebOnto - a Web-based knowledge modeling tool, allowing users to browse and edit knowledge models over the Web (Knowledge Media Institute, UK). Uses OCML as the underlying language.
• WikiTaxonomy - The Wiki ontology (taxonomy) extracted from Wikipedia (by EML Research, Germany).
• WonderTools - for helping select an ontology-building tool (SWI, Univ Amsterdam, Netherlands).
• WordMap - A commercial taxonomy management system for building and deploying taxonomies quickly and easily.
• WordNet - a large, on-line lexical reference system. Also see:
  • WebKB-2, a "tidied up" WordNet derivative
  • (independent project) FrameNet
• YAGO - a huge semantic knowledge base. Currently, YAGO knows more than 2 million entities (like persons, organizations, cities, etc.). It knows 20 million facts about these entities. Unlike many other automatically assembled knowledge bases, YAGO has a manually confirmed accuracy of 95%. YAGO is part of the YAGO-NAGA project at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrucken, Germany.