Transitioning Applications to Ontologies

Transitioning Applications to Ontologies or TAO is a project in the European Sixth Framework Program (FP6).
Project Summary
The goal of the TAO project is to define methods and tools for transition of legacy information systems to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications. This migration path is intended to be low-cost, to be accessible to both SMEs and large enterprises. TAO will ease the transition to Service-Oriented Architecture through Semantic Web Services bootstrapping - an innovative methodology, based on state-of-the-art ontology learning and semantic data integration.
The project will also tackle several major bottlenecks of knowledge technologies in the areas of semi-automatic creation of ontologies, automated methods for metadata creation and augmentation of legacy content, and distributed heterogeneous repositories.
Semantic Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture that host them, are expected by the project to make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of European ICT in the coming period, based on the fact that significant recent initiatives have built up strong foundations for practical semantic SOA. They have shown how new systems can profitably deploy semantics as a lingua franca for modeling the points of contact between software components at a higher level than previous technology. TAO aims to create an open source infrastructure enabling a much larger group of companies to exploit semantics without having to re-implement their applications.
The methodology and tools developed by the project will be validated in two high-profile case studies: the open source platform GATE, with thousands of users, and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business).
Related Technologies and Standards
* Semantic Web Services
* Web Services Description Language : TAO is member of the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL Working Group
* Web Service Modeling Ontology
* RDF vocabularies, in particular OWL and SKOS
* OWL-S
Related Projects
Other European research projects are working in similar domains and have strong synergy with TAO, among which :
* SEKT
* INFRAWEBS
* SUPER
* Knowledge Web
* LUISA
* DIP
An exhaustive list can be found on project website
Partners
According to FP6 requirements, the project partners include universities, large and small companies, from five different European countries.
*Universities
**University of Sheffield, UK : Content augmentation, user case study 1. Project co-ordinator.
**University of Southampton, UK : TAO methodology and related tools.
**JoÅ¾ef Stefan Institute, Slovenia : Ontology learning tools.
*Large companies
**Dassault Aviation, France : User case study 2.
**Atos Origin, Spain : TAO infrastructure developer, exploitation leader.
*SMEs
**Mondeca, France : Technology provider in areas of expertise.
**Ontotext, Bulgaria : Heterogeneous knowledge stores, software provider.
Factsheet
*Project type: STReP
*Project Reference: IST-2004-026460
*Project Acronym: TAO
*Project Name: Transitioning Applications to Ontologies
*Action line: IST-2004-2.4.7
*Total cost: 4,246,696 euros
*Commission Funding: 2,824,950 euros
*Project Duration: 2006-03-01 to 2009-02-28

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