VPI: Virtual Perspective Interface

SWAT Lab, Lehigh University

Overview

Virtual Perspective Interface (VPI) enables existing knowledge base systems to support ontology versioning. The main purpose of this tool is to ensure that when ontologies change, old data is accessible both through the view of the new version of the ontology and by legacy applications that use the older version. This is an example of prospective use (i.e., using newer versions of some ontologies to access knowledge represented in previous versions of those ontologies), as opposed to retrospective use (i.e., using older versions of some ontologies to access knowledge represented in newer versions of those ontologies). The VPI obviates the need for wholesale translation of existing data every time an ontology is changed. There is no standard semantics for versioning in distributed ontology systems. The semantics of the VPI is given by ontology perspective theory, which was also developed by Lehigh.

Contacts

Zhengxiang Pan

Installation

Download and unzip the package. VPI build 1 uses Jena, VPI build 3 uses HAWK, which are included in the package respectively.
Make sure that the java classpath includes every jar file in the 'lib' folder.

Getting started with VPI

Please follow the readme file in the package.

License

This software is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See the license for details.