The PROTON (PROTo ONtology) ontology has been developed in the SEKT project as a lightweight upper-level ontology, serving as a modelling basis for a number of tasks in different domains. To mention just a few applications: PROTON is meant to serve as a seed for ontology generation (new ontologies constructed by extending PROTON); it can be used for automatic entity recognition and more generally Information Extraction (IE) from text, for the sake of semantic annotation (metadata generation). PROTON was extended to cover the conceptual knowledge encoded within the most popular datasets from Linked Open Data like DBPedia, GeoNames, etc.

PROTON is split into 4 modules, which can be accessed as follows:

• PROTON System module: http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protonsys
• PROTON Top module: http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protontop
• PROTON Extension module: http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protonext
• PROTON Knowledge Management module: http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protonkm

Documentation

Proton has two types of documentation:

• General documentation: general ontology architecture, main classes and properties
• Online documentation: all Proton classes and properties.

Usage

Proton is used in many projects around the world for semantic search and annotation in commerical projects for The National Archive of Great Britain, and for research projects from FP7 programme, such as RENDER and MOLTO, which partially support its development.

Proton is also used as a reference layer which facilitates the access and navigation to a segment of LOD cloud in FactForge.

References

[DamovaEtAl-Proton2010] Mariana Damova, Atanas Kiryakov, Kiril Simov and Svetoslav Petrov
Mapping the central LOD ontologies to PROTON upper-level ontology.
Ontology Mapping Workshop at ISWC 2010, Shanghai, China, November 2010. 
http://om2010.ontologymatching.org: the paper

[TerzievEtAl2005] Ivan Terziev, Atanas Kiryakov, Dimitar Manov.
Base Upper-level Ontology (BULO) Guidance
Deliverable 1.8.1, SEKT project, July 2005.
http://proton.semanticweb.org/D1_8_1.pdf

License

PROTON ontology is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.