Architectural Suggestions for Ontology Management

This document describes the steps that required for creating and maintaining an ontology; for exploiting an ontology in order to describe data from one or more data sources; and for developing services and applications that provide unified access and insightful analysis on the data. The document provides the state of the art of the various tools and software components that exist and can be used for carrying out various tasks of the overall process. The components are grouped based on their intended use and for each one of them a concise description, as well as other useful details (i.e. if they are open-source, their license, etc.), are provided. For each step or task, the involved software components are also described in a table presenting their details with respect to various dimensions (e.g. open-source, license, available online, key advantages, etc.), in order to enable their quick comparison. Moreover, successful examples of semantic data integration are presented, i.e., for cases where a top-level ontology is used for integrating data for the cultural and biodiversity domain, and services for large-scale semantic data integration (including hundreds of datasets from several domains). Furthermore, it provides the high-level architectural suggestions that can be used as a basis for the actual implementation of any ontology-based system; the described processes and tools can be exploited for the development of the ontology-based functionality. Finally, it offers the adaptations of the proposed architecture for the EFSA case studies, by providing details about their components and indicative pipelines and tools.