Platform for Ontology Engineering and Evolution for Nanotechnology

The field of nanotechnology provides unique informatics challenges due to the complexity and heterogeneity associated with nanomaterials and their characterization. An entire new research field of Nanotechnology Informatics (known as nanoinformatics) has emerged to address these challenges.

Three major research themes define our involvment with nanoinformatics:

• Data representation, sharing, and archiving activities in nanotechnology
• Vocabulary and ontology development as well as related semantic technology supporting nanotechnology research
• Predictive models for nanomaterial physical and biological properties

NQCG is supporting the development of a platform for semi-automatic construction and manipulation of industry-quality ontologies.

This initiative will suggest a methodology for ontology development and use and provide a collaborative environment incorporating a range of state of the art techniques to aid in the creation, evolution and adoption of ontologies in the nanotechnology domain. Our focus is to provide cost-effective practical technologies to assist in the process of production of high-quality ontologies.

The technologies and models used in the platform target the needs of the industry and the research community at different levels:

• Provision of a seamless infrastructure for development

Open collaborative infrastructure supporting a range of different media and providing continuously available resources for cooperation and exchange

• Provision of intelligent search & mining

Offering content-based processing and reasoning about domain-dependent data sources

• Provision of a communication portal

Including provision of interactive, value-increasing services and information for collaboration within and across communities and organisations, and for citizens and members alike

The platform will support semi-automatic learning and evolution of ontologies from text; the incorporation of logical and statistical techniques for ontology manipulation and refinement; and will provide a full-fledged ontology for searching and mining nano science and nanotechnology research papers.

The platform will be demonstrated by applications to case studies relevant to the nanotechnology domain.