About the Ontology Repository

The Project

The Ontology Repository is a product of the eResearch group at the University of Queensland, lead by Jane Hunter and implemented by Peter Becker. Funding is provided by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) via the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education.

Goals

The project aims to produce a repository for ontologies that allows sharing information between researchers across the world. It is geared towards enabling communication within research communities and aligning concepts and terminology of different individuals and groups within a domain and across multiple domains.

The repository should allow its users to identify existing ontologies relevant for their work, independent if they were created within their research community or by someone outside that community. It should allow linking information about relevant work across all disciplines and encourage people to build their own ontologies on existing higher level structures.

Technology

The eResearch Ontology Repository is designed to integrate well with the web in a RESTful manner, allowing users to browse the site using all browser features, including bookmarking, the back button, multiple open pages and so on. It uses JavaScript and CSS to provide a more dynamic and better user experience while avoiding having too much state on the client side which could not be part of the RESTful design.

On the client side HTML and CSS as used in a way that is compatible with most modern browsers. The dynamic parts rely on existing JavaScript libraries such as Dojo and Dijit for general scripting and GUI components as well as Exhibit for the dynamic browse display.

The backend is based on a modern Java stack. Metadata is persisted in a relational database using JPA and validation annotations with Hibernate. Indexing for the full-text search uses the Lucene search engine. The web pages are delivered using the Restlet framework and engine, the rendering of the pages is done using Freemarker templates. Aspects such as persistence management, authentication/authorization or security risks such as cross-site-scripting vulnaribilities are managed by an internal framework build on top of these tools.

Icons from the Crystal Project are used on the site.