Goals

Create a formal ontology for use by the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library group, extract metadata sets form the ontology for use by our project to describe intellectual work, services and rights, and to have a variety of agents using the ontology to reason about services in a variety of ways.

Activities

The Conspectus group meets nearly every week, furthering the development of the ontology, developing metadata in conjuction with members of the education group, and testing the ontological descriptions against actual repources in the digital library.

In particular:

• Creation of definitions of ontological concepts and relationships
• Identification of core concepts useful in describing resources and extracting those concepts as metadata
• Mapping established metadata sets into our ontological structure, beginning with MARC
• Continulally examining other metadata and descriptive standards to both keep abreast of the activities in this field and improve our ontology efforts

Working Demos/Examples

The Ontology Page

http://www.umich.edu/~peterw/Ontology/ontology.html