From NeOn Wiki

Dec 16 2008. We are pleased to announce the winners of our NeOn Plugin Developer's Contest. All submitted plugins were judged on a number of criteria, including originality, robustness, design, and documentation. The three winning plugins cover topics as diverse as inconsistency handling, ontology comparison, and reasoning over data in relational databases. Without further ado, these are our three winners:

3rd prize of €500 goes to the "Inconsistency Handler" by Steffen Stadtmüller The Inconsistency Handler provides a way to deal with inconsistent and incoherent knowledge bases in OWL. This is done by considering inconsistent ontologies to be based on a four-valued logic. These ontologies are translated to new consistent and coherent ontologies, in a way that classical two-valued reasoning tasks with the translated ontologies result in the same conclusions as paraconsistent four-valued reasoning.

2nd prize of €1,000 goes to the "OWL-Diff Plugin" by Petr Křemen OWLdiff is a project for comparing and merging of two ontologies. It aims to help managing and updating ontologies, which are often modified by several sides, and merging of concurrent updates is necessary. OWLdiff serves the same purpose for ontologies, as diff does for textual files. It takes two ontologies as arguments; let us call them the "original" and the "update." Then it uses the Pellet reasoner to check, if the two ontologies are semantically equivalent. If not, it shows the differences graphically in two trees, one for each ontology. User can select differing items in either tree, which is to be updated in the resulting merged ontology.

1st prize of €2,000 goes to the "OBDA Plugin for NeOn" by Mariano Rodriguez-Muro The OBDA Plugin for the Neon Toolkit is an add-on which enables the Toolkit to interact with reasoners the OBDA extensions to the DIG 1.1 protocol. It provides facilities to declare RDBMS data sources and design powerful datasource-ontology mappings. More over, the OBDA plugin modifies NeOn's DIG reasoner-synchronization mechanism to include the synchronization of these new entities. To summarize, the OBDA plugin enables NeOn users to work in the OBDA architecture, freeing them from the requirement of "fetching" data from data sources before performing reasoning over it.

This is how the winner, Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, reacted to the announcement: "We were very happy here at Bolzano to hear this news. We believe that in the context of the NeOn project, the OBDA Plugin for the NeOn Toolkit could be very useful and we were glad to contribute. This news certainly motivates us to keep going. We would also like to cheer the NeOn team for the plugin architecture that was chosen for the Toolkit, it was a real pleasure to develop for this framework. Cheers for NeOn!"

We as the NeOn Consortium are very pleased with the results of the competition and we hope that this event will increase interest in NeOn and will lead more and more developers to contribute Plugins to the NeOn Toolkit.


Story By: Holger Lewen Related links