TAO - Transitioning Applications to Ontologies. TAO is about how existing 'legacy' applications can migrate to open, semantics-based Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Semantic Web Services (SWS), and SOA that host them, will make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of European ICT in the coming period. This will happen in two ways. First, Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) will become less costly and more reliable because of explicit modelling of the meaning of data and processes in the systems owned by different business units. Second, B2B and B2C eCommerce systems will become:
more reusable, with interfaces that are meaningful for machines as well as for humans;
more dynamic and adaptive, with the possibility of virtual applications composed from dynamically discovered components;
more scaleable, distributed across multiple machines;
saleable as discreet elements in the application service providers market.
TAO is funded as a Specific Targeted Research Project under European Commission 6th FP with a budget around 3M euros. It started March 2006 and runs for 3 years. TAO is coordinated by University of Sheffield, UK.
Contact: Damyan Ognyanov.
Project objectives
The project's main goal is to define a low-cost route to transitioning legacy systems to the open semantic SOAs, which will enable semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications. This low-cost migration path will be accessible to both SMEs (which are cost sensitive) and large enterprises (with huge investments in complex and critical IS).
The three RTD objectives of TAO are:
SWS bootstrapping via semi-automatic acquisition of domain ontologies from legacy DB schemata, application documentation, and API-level code and comments;
augmentation and integration of legacy content (databases and documents used by applications) relative to the domain ontologies to create semantic repositories with ontology based information access;
Transitioning Methodology and Infrastructure: support the developer with a user-friendly infrastructure for the transitioning of existing application into semantic SOAs. A SWS bootstrapping methodology with detailed examples from an open-source reference application will be provided to facilitate take-up.
Ontotext involvement in TAO
Main responsibilities:
Heterogeneous Knowledge Stores
Architecture
Implementation of non-distributed version
Evaluation
Integration Schemes
Semantic Search and Browse Tools
High-level objectives:
To marry our SWS, Ontology Management, and Sem. Annotatation developments into concise framework;
