Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with Gerald Reif about my master thesis. The provisional working title is "Ontology visualizations for the Semantic Web".
This work will be a small piece for the WEESA project (Web Engineering for Semantic Web Applications) which aims to provide semantic information for web pages and integrate this development as part of the web engineering process for XML/XSLT based web applications. WEESA defines a flexible mapping between the application's XML schema and one ore more ontologies for automatic semantic annotation.
My part will be to do a comparative evaluation of existing ontology editors and visualization tools which allow easy selection of classes and properties of different ontologies and makes the absolute URI available for the WEESA mapping definition. One tool will then be chosen and extended to the provide needed functionality.
Depending on the effort it takes to implement the missing features of the chosen tool it might be possible to implement a prototype of the mapping editor too.
Personally I'll try to cover some more things which I am interested at too:
* Version control of all artifacts concerning the master thesis (notes, emails, documentation, source code, ...) using Subversion and experimenting with decentral version control using SVK for offline development.
* Project automation using Cruise Control or a similar tool.
* Unit Testing using JUnit and related frameworks.
All three concerns are described in the excellent books of the Pragmatic Bookshelf which I read recently:
* Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion
* Pragmatic Unit Testing: in Java using JUnit
* Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications
Stay tuned for further updates ...
