Knoodl.com

Knoodl.com is a fully integrated, web-based application designed to support community-oriented development of ontologies and RDF knowledgebases. It also serves as a semantic technology platform enabling users to build semantic applications using their ontologies and knowledgebases. Knoodl offers built in application development tools or a service based interface to build your own semantic applications. It is available for free on the web or can be licensed to run behind a firewall. The behind the firewall version is called MyKnoodl.

For a brief overview of Knoodl, take a look at our webcast.

Knoodl's Capabilities:

• Cloud-based application ( Amazon EC2 )
• Ontology editing
• Ontology import/export
• Collaboration
• Role-based security
• SPARQL query wizard
• Ontology guided search
• Scalable RDF store
• SPARQL Endpoint
• Graphical ontology mapping wizard (Coming soon)
• User designed widgets and gadgets for viewing data (Coming soon)
• Rules and inference engine (Coming soon)
• User designed widgets and gadgets for entering data and submitting queries (Coming soon)

Collaborative Ontology Editor

All content in Knoodl is organized into Communities. Communities can be created by any user and for the purpose of managing Wikis and Vocabularies (ontologies with wiki content). Vocabularies are ideal for collaboratively developing ontologies because they incorporate aspects of a wiki so that business people and domain experts can contribute, without having to edit the ontology. Every page in Knoodl is a wiki page and every resource (class, property, or instance) in an ontology has its own page. The page for an individual resource, therefore, is a wiki page, but it also contains the formal information stored in the ontology; it is one-half structured information and one-half unstructured.

Using the wiki section, modelers can provide the entire context necessary to enable the general community to understand the ontologies, while domain experts, who lack modeling skills, can contribute their necessary, domain-specific knowledge to the ontology development process in the form of natural language text. Any members of the community can subscribe to any of the pages of concern to them via standard RSS functionality so that they will be notified when any changes are made.

The degree of collaboration offered by Knoodl enables the best practice of "bottom-up" ontology development. It is generally agreed now that ontologies developed from the bottom up, as opposed to top down, are more usable in the real world.

Security

Communities in Knoodl are governed using a role-based permission model which grants users various combinations of privileges (view, edit, create, delete, etc.). Community administrators can assign the necessary roles to community members based on their modeling ability and domain expertise.

Knowledgebase

Knoodl incorporates a fully scalable RDF store ( Mulgara ) with a rules engine ( Krule ) and is hosted in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is a true multitenant application; scalability and highly distributed usage are never problems. Because it is web-based, Knoodl provides a way for facts to be collected from a widespread community of people.

Knoodl has a graphical user interface for performing ontology guided search and for mapping ontologies together. The ontology mapping wizard can be used to federate queries to Knoodl knowledgebases, as well as SPARQL endpoints on the web. Knoodl also enables communities to design specific forms for collecting data described by their ontologies making it easy to use for anyone. Communities can also design custom forms for submitting queries to the knowledgebase and then can design reusable widgets and gadgets to visualize the results of those queries. These capabilities are designed to offer users the abilities to build their own semantic applications within Knoodl but they can also build their own application on top of Knoodl by writing Java Server Pages and Java Script that make use of the exposed Java Beans.