Esperonto Services (Application Service Provision of Semantic Annotation, Aggregation, Indexing and Routing of Textual, Multimedia, and Multilingual Web Content - IST-2001-34373) aimed to overcome the problem of information overload by adding meaning to the Web, which can be exploited by software agents to whom people and businesses can delegate tasks.

Esperonto's objective was to bridge the gap between the past World Wide Web and the Semantic Web by providing a service to "upgrade" existing content to semantic Web content. Ontologies play a key role in this effort, aiming at unifying, bridging and integrating multiple heterogeneous, international and multilingual digital content. Once Semantic Web content becomes available, the project aimed to exploit this content through innovative graphical navigation, and prototyping distributed added value services.

The main goal of the Esperonto Services project was to design and develop a technological infrastructure for creating islands of the Semantic Web. The overall goal was decomposed in various concrete, measurable objectives.

• To create an ontology-based technological infrastructure for managing the semantics of content.
• To create a technological infrastructure for (semi)-automatically annotating existing content with semantic information (metadata).
• To create a technological infrastructure for dealing with multilingual content.
• To design and to prototype a technological infrastructure for storing and accessing Semantic Web content, as well as for routing requests to Semantic Web content in a scalable, decentralised manner.
• To illustrate the added value of Semantic Web technology by developing three case studies in the cultural, public administration and biotechnology sectors.

OEG role in Esperonto

OEG was involved in the development of methodologies, techniques, tools and services to bridge the gap between the previous Web and the Semantic Web. Specifically, OEG was involved in the building of the following results:

• Wrapper technologies and methodologies to upgrade content to the Semantic Web.
  • R2O and ODEMapster. ODEMapster transforms database content into Semantic Web content (RDF) according to the mappings specified in the R2O language.
  • ODESWS allows creating Semantic Web Services by means of a user interface that relies on problem solving method modelling
• The refinement of the WebODE ontology engineering platform with new import and export services, version control and evolution services and more usable edition facilities. Besides, it includes the following components, which have been identified separately as Esperonto results: an ontology alignment service and the ontology evaluation module ODEval. Additionally, an ontology translation module called OntoTranslate. The ontology editor gives support for the translation of ontology terms to multiple languages (Spanish, English, and German) and its interface is also available in those languages. Besides, the platform allows storing and retrieving ontology terms in multiple languages.
• The Semantic Web portal generation system ODESeW.

Additionally, OEG was involved in the development of kernel ontologies to be used as upper level ontologies as well as domain ontologies for culture (art), funding organizations and biotechnology. Kernel ontologies of time, space, measurement units and physical magnitudes have been developed and are publicly available.

Participants

Las personas involucradas en el desarrollo del proyecto Esperonto fueron:

• Asunción Gómez-Pérez
• Oscar Corcho
• Mariano Fernández-López
• Rafael González-Cabero
• Ángel López-Cima
• Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa

Publications and main results

The following publications have been generated in the context of this project:

• Corcho O, Gómez-Pérez A, González-Cabero, R, Suárez-Figueroa MC (2004) ODEval: a Tool for evaluating RDF(S), DAML+OIL, and OWL Concept Taxonomies. IFIP WG12.6 -- First IFIP Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations (AIAI 2004) Toulouse, France (August, 22-27, 2004)
• Fernández-López M, Gómez-Pérez, A (2004) "Searching for a Time Ontology for Semantic Web Applications". International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS'04), Turín, Italia
• Gómez-Pérez A, González-Cabero R, Lama M (November 2004): ODE SWS, A Semantic Web Service Development Tool. Proceedings of the Demo Sesion of the International Semantic Web Conference. Hiroshima, Japan.
• Gómez-Pérez A, González-Cabero R, Lama M (September 2004): Development of Semantic Web Services at the Knowledge Level. European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS). Erfurt, Germany
• Gómez-Pérez A, Suárez-Figueroa MC (2004) An Evaluation of RDF(S) and DAML+OIL Import/Export Services within Ontology Platforms. 3rd Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI 2004) Mexico City, Mexico (April 26-30, 2004).
• Gómez-Pérez A, Suárez-Figueroa MC (2004) Ontology Evaluation Functionalities of RDF(S), DAML+OIL, and OWL Parsers and Ontology Platforms. 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) Lisboa, Portugal (26-27-28 May 2004).
• Corcho O, Fernández-López M, Gómez-Pérez A, López-Cima A. Construcción de ontologías legales con la metodología METHONTOLOGY y la herramienta WebODE. Web Semántica y ontologías jurídicas. Aplicaciones para el derecho en la nueva generación de la red. Comares.
• Corcho O, Fernández-López M, Gómez-Pérez A, López-Cima A. Building legal ontologies with METHONTOLOGY and WebODE. Law and the Semantic Web. Springer-Verlag.
• Fernández-López M, Gómez-Pérez, A (2004) "Searching for a Time Ontology for a Semantic Web Application". Journal of Data Semantics.
• Arpírez. J. Corcho, O.; Fernández-López, M.; Gómez-Pérez, A.; WebODE in a Nutshell, AI Magazine, Fall 2003, volume 24, Nº 3.
• Gómez-Pérez A, González-Cabero R, Lama M (2005): An Environment for Building Semantic Web Services at the Knowledge Level. International Journal of Web and Grid Services.