Oxford: Semantic software for Web ontologies

20 Aug 2008 | News

Licensing opportunity

Researchers at the University of Oxford have created a software application to meet the increasing demand from all industry sectors to capture detailed domain knowledge – called an ontology – and combine this with data from multiple sources to answer complex questions about the domain of knowledge.

The new application, called HermiT, is able to reason over several ontologies, including the original version of the GALEN medical terminology ontology, that have defeated existing state-of-the-art reasoning systems, says Isis Innovation, Oxford’s technology transfer arm.

The present generation of semantic reasoners suffers from serious performance problems caused by the number and size of the information structures that they need to construct and consider, explains Isis.

The software has been developed using the Java programming language. Isis would like to talk to companies interested in licensing this software for use in knowledge representation tools and applications.


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