The presentation introduces the LOBO intelligent ontology management tool prototype, and gives a brief overview of its application domains.

Ontologies are used more and more in building up to date information systems. An ontology codifies the explicit body of knowledge in a specific domain and describes the intrinsic relationships within it. Ontologies are especially important for intelligent Web search engines as they help to build the "Semantic Web", where information is not only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. Ontologies can also play a significant role in accessing conventional information-sources in a more efficient and user-friendly way.

The ontology management tool presented here builds on the results of the SILK Framework 5 EU-project. The SILK (System Integration via Logic and Knowledge, IST-1999-11135) project was co-ordinated by IQSOFT Ltd. and was carried out in co-operation with French, Romanian, and Greek partners. The three-year research and development work was successfully concluded in October 2002. The main result of the project is the SILK tool-set which supports the integration of heterogeneous information sources. SILK uses the object-oriented paradigm and its languages, such as UML and OCL, and its implementation is based on constraint and logic programming. In addition to conventional relational and object-oriented databases, SILK supports access and integration of XML and RDF based information sources, as well as SOAP based Web services.

The LOBO (LOgic Based Ontology management, IKTA-00126/2002) project builds on the base technology provided by the SILK tool-set, and extends it towards ontology integration. The biomedical domain, selected as the pilot application, is an extremely important part of the LOBO project. This domain plays a significant role today, because following the rapid development of the 90's, the biological medicine (and the related fields of molecular biology, genetic engineering etc.) produces an exponentially increasing volume of biological data and makes it available on the Internet. However it becomes more and more problematic to find and use the relevant data available in this information "jungle".

In the presentation we introduce the first prototype of the LOBO system which supports the intelligent use of RDF based data sources. We have chosen RDF for this exploratory phase, as it is the base language of the Semantic Web approach, and thus a large amount of information is available in this format. The prototype provides tools for querying, comparison and consistency checking of ontologies written as RDF schemas. Through schemas, the LOBO system may be able to answer queries, which would have been impossible to answer using the traditional approach. Furthermore, the prototype supports the integration of the ontologies written as RDF schemas, so it can partly automate the building of unified ontologies. Thanks to the SILK background, it is possible to link RDF schemas with the meta-information extracted from other kind of data sources, such as relational, OO, etc. sources. Based on this, we can create a unified ontology, which describes both RDF and relational databases simultaneously and thus provides access to the underlying data through in a homogeneous way.