Tuesday, 5/22/2007
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Level: Technical - Introductory

In contrast to conventional Model-Driven Architecture known from object-oriented systems, semantic applications use their data models not only at design time, but also as run-time components. The rich declarative semantics of ontological data models can be exploited to drive user interfaces and to control an application's behavior. In order to develop such applications, ontology modeling tools can serve as rapid prototyping environments with very smooth transitions from requirements analysis, ontology design and component implementation to deployment. This talk introduces ontology-driven software development with the TopBraid tool suite. TopBraid Composer is the leading professional ontology modeling tool for Semantic Web languages (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SWRL). TopBraid Composer provides features to import legacy data models (databases, UML and XML models), to edit class definitions and rules, to execute reasoning engines, to visualize diagrams and graphs, and to perform refactorings. Composer is based on Eclipse, allowing programmers to develop application components as plug-ins to the editing environment. Developers can also use TopBraid Composer to customize forms and deploy these forms in web applications. The TopBraid Live runtime server can be used to display and edit these forms, together with other AJAX components for class trees and query browsers. This talk will walk through an application development life cycle and demonstrate tool support for each stage, based on real-world examples.

Holger is a well-known practitioner and tool developer in the Semantic Web field. During his time as a PostDoc at Stanford, he did the original design and implementation of Protege-OWL, the most widely used open-source ontology editor. He joined TopQuadrant by the end of 2005 to work as the lead developer of the TopBraid product suite.