Ontologies: Mature Research Tools?

Speaker: Rob Warren

Ontology research has had a renewed interest with the release of two ontological markup standards, DAML+OIL and OWL, in December of 2001 and March of 2002.

In this talk I'll review some of the work I did while at the Fungal Web Project in Montreal, where we faced several questions about the use and adoption of ontologies and their markup languages:

Have ontologies grown out of 'toy' research applications?

What are ontologies being used for by organisations?

How do we build, maintain and integrate them?

What tools are available? What are the scaling issues?

I'll report on some of our findings concerning ontology use 'in the wild' and talk about highlights from the knowledge-based bioinformatics workshop held earlier this month.