About
Magpie used its ontology infrastructure to semantically mark up web documents on-the-fly. The existing technologies in this problem domain tended to be rather heavyweight and often modified the appearance of the actual webpage. While these modifications were sometimes acceptable, they could also cause significant annoyance for the user. Often, these technologies relied on one very specific ontology.
To address some of these issues, work on Magpie technology began, aimed at creating a lightweight solution that provided sufficiently robust and flexible features for semantically enriched browsing. The Magpie tool aimed to identify and filter out concepts of interest from any webpage it was given. The set of concepts could be influenced by selecting a particular ontology of concepts and relations.
In addition to identifying relevant concepts from the perspective of a specific ontology, each concept could provide an applicable set of relations or commands that could be executed. These relationships were determined and evaluated dynamically by querying the ontology server. Another feature believed to enhance the user experience was the ability to turn semantic menus on or off, highlight all instances belonging to a particular ontological class, and follow and semantically process embedded links.
Keywords
Knowledge management, semantic web browser, ontologies, knowledge modelling, dynamic linking, semantic web services
Research Team
Martin Dzbor
Enrico Motta
John Domingue
Marc Eisenstadt
Publications
Dzbor, M., Motta, E. and Domingue, J. (2007) Magpie: Experiences in supporting Semantic Web browsing, Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 5, 3, pp. 204-222, Elsevier B.V.
Dzbor, M. and Motta, E. (2007) Semantic Web Technology to Support Learning about the Semantic Web, 13th Intl. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, California, eds. R. Luckin, K.R. Koedinger and J. Greer, pp. 25-32, IOS Press.
Dzbor, M., Stutt, A., Motta, E. and Collins, T. (2007) Representations for semantic learning webs: Semantic Web technology in learning support, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23, 1, pp. 69-82, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., UK.
Dzbor, M. and Motta, E. (2006) Study on Integrating Semantic Applications with Magpie, 12th Conference on AI Methodology, Systems & Applications (AIMSA), Varna, Bulgaria, eds. Jerome Euzenat and John Domingue, pp. 66-76, Springer Verlag.
Dzbor, M., Motta, E. and Domingue, J. (2004) Opening Up Magpie via Semantic Services, International Semantic Web Conference, Hiroshima, Japan Proceedings of the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004), pp. 635-649, Springer Verlag.
Domingue, J., Dzbor, M. and Motta, E. (20004) Collaborative Semantic Web Browsing with Magpie, 1st European Semantic Web Symposium, Heraklion, Greece.
Domingue, J., Dzbor, M. and Motta, E. (2004) Magpie: Supporting browsing and Navigating on the Semantic Web, International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Island of Madeira, Portugal.
Acknowledgements
Research activities related to the Magpie project were or had been supported by the climateprediction.net, Dot.Kom, KnowledgeWeb and Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT). Climateprediction.net was a project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and UK Department of Trade and Industry e-Science Initiative. Dot.Kom project was supported by European Union IST Framework V grant no.IST-2001-34038; KnowledgeWeb was an IST Framework VI Network of Excellence (grant no.FP6-507482) sponsored by European Union. AKT was an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council by grant no.GR/N15764/01.
