Semantic web research

HP Labs has a number of investments in the area of the semantic web, many of which are organised under the umbrella of the Semantic Web Programme in HPL Bristol. This programme of work includes tool and application development, and basic theory research. For more details of the programme itself, and the various sub-projects, see the programme web site.

One of the main deliverables from our group to date has been a family of Java tools for semantic web software developers, centered around the open-source Jena platform. My contributions include:

• the ontology API, for RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL ontologies,
• the schemagen tool for creating vocabulary classes from OWL and RDFS ontologies,
• the Jena DIG interface for connecting Jena models to external DL reasoners.

Our commitment to supporting the development of the semantic web as a new approach to building open, distributed information systems includes actively supporting Jena through an active support list.

My other research interests around the semantic web include lightweight approaches to informal knowledge management, integrating ontology editing and visualisation into JFC applications, and agents for the semantic web. I am happy to discuss these topics with other researchers working in similar areas.