1) My publications at

http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/seanb

There are various things there relating to OilEd and DAML+OIL -- some of the papers coauthored with Robert (e.g. the recent IEEE Information Technology in Biomedicine papers) are also about how to build ontlogies. Those are a little out of date as they focus on OIL rather than DAML+OIL, but you should get the gist out of them. Similarly, some of the older things like the 1999 AI*IA paper and the STEP 97 paper give some of the motivational material we went over yesterday. The UIDIS 99 paper discusses the TAMBIS ontology-driven interface.

2) Ian Horrocks' web page:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/

and in particular his publications:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/publications.html

Ian's the man responsible for the reasoner and the optimisation techniques that have allowed us to use DLs in real applications. A lot of this stuff is "hard logic" :-), but if you really want to know how it all works, look there! Ian's also one of the leading lights in the web ontology world, so some of his publications relating to DAML+OIL may be worth a look.

Alan Rector - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/ai/Staff/alan.html - Professor in Medical Informatics here in Manchester has a long pedigree in building ontologies, particularly through the GALEN projects.

A classic paper on taxonomies and taxonomic links is:

Ronald J. Brachman: What IS-A Is and Isn't: An Analysis of Taxonomic Links in Semantic Networks. IEEE Computer 16(10): 30-36 (1983)

Alex Borgida - http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~borgida/index.html - also has a number of good introductory papers relating description logics and data management, e.g.

Alexander Borgida: Description Logics in Data Management. TKDE 7(5): 671-682 (1995)

This provides quite a good introduction to what DLs can do for you.

If you're interested in using any of the code that has been developed for OilEd, it's available from the web site:

http://oiled.man.ac.uk/

The source is distributed under GPL. If you've registered to download it, you can also get the source from there. Note that we are in the process of reengineering some of this, so there's not really any support available for the codebase. It's pretty much "sold as seen".

That should keep you occupied for a while! I'm away on holiday for the next couple of weeks, but Robert is around (and is the person to ask the ontology building questions of anyway).

Cheers,

Sean

--
Sean Bechhofer
seanb@cs.man.ac.uk
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~seanb