NASA
We started working with NASA on several Semantic Web projects in 2005, including BIANCA and POPS.
BIANCA
BIANCA is a web application and service that integrates all the information about NASA HQ applications, servers, and networks into a single view—including the relations between apps, servers, and networks. BIANCA includes a facility for doing dependency analysis, optimizing repair plans to respond to outages, and will (eventually) include information derived dynamically from SNMP, intrusion detection systems, etc.
BIANCA is built with Pylons, a Python web framework, and Sesame, a leading Java RDF database.
POPS
POPS is an expertise locator for the 20,000 civil servants inside NASA. It also integrates several disparate data sources into an RDF aggregation. This data collection is searched via a special polyarchical query browser, which we call JSpace. JSpace translates user input—using a user interface derived from mspace, a Javascript RDF browser—to create RDF queries against the data aggregation. JSpace is an open source Java program which can be easily applied to other RDF data browsing applications.
We gave a talk about POPS at XTech 2006.
NCI
Explanation Service
The National Cancer Institute’s Center for Bioinformatics is transitioning its large (60,000+ classes) thesaurus of cancer terms to OWL, and we’re working on an explanation service to help their modeling team curate and extend it. This work includes increasing the performance of Pellet, particularly the classification code. We’re also beefing up the performance of the explanation and justification feaures (using axiom pinpointing), as well as implementing some user interface in Protege.
Consulting and Support
We’ve been working on some feasiblity studies for several large clients that we can’t yet talk about, mostly related to commercial, real-world OWL and Pellet applications.