Composing the Semantic Web

TopBraid Composer - http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/.

I've been looking for a semantic web tool that combines the functionality I've seen from Protégé, Jena, and a programming environment, and provides management tools to ease the effort of developing software. TopBraid Composer seems very promising, this is a toolset for developing ontologies combines the advantages of ease of use of development of Protégé with searching based on Jena and the Java Eclipse programming environment. This means that if I want to I can create software totally in the TopBraid Composer environment unlike my examples of http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm, where I converted source trees to result trees via a separate program http://wiki.vanguardsw.com/bin/browse.dsb?det/Engineering/Aerospace/Wing%20Spar%20Translated%20from%20Protege%20Taxonomy, to perform decisions and calculations. It's good to be able to link different tools like this, but also good to have the choice to work purely within one environment.

I particularly like this blog posting that explains how this tool can Lifting Excel into the Semantic Web on Holger Knublauch's (TopBraid Composer developer) blog http://composing-the-semantic-web.blogspot.com/ on how the application can import and use Excel spreadsheets. This is particularly important for end-user development as spreadsheets are often the first application that end user programmers use to facilitate their software development.

I'll also be looking at General Electric's ACUITy tool which was presented at the Jena conference http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html, to provide this kind of functionality. http://www.opencyc.org/ also looks interesting but I don't know much about it yet.