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- Ontology developers can use any tool that generates / reads SKOS to update the ontology. As examples Protégé contains a SKOS plug-in, and Google Refine has a way to translate between a spreadsheet format and SKOS. We propose that editing the Synapse ontology is a task done by a small number of in-house experts, who will check that ontology as SKOS into SVN, giving us versioning, merging and diff on our ontology, and setting us up for interoperability with other systems.
- We will publish Ontology in NCBO as new versions when we want to upgrade the Synapse ontology and make it available to external developers and the Synapse system. This makes the ontology available to both our own and external developers via the NCBO web services, including a SPARQL endpoint (general-purpose graph-query language). Our Google Refine project, for example, is hitting the public NCBO services to support term-reconciliation off any NCBO ontology.
- We will add a new set of Concept Services to Synapse to provide easy use of the Synapse ontology in Synapse clients. This will also insulate real-time users making these calls from a dependency on an external web service, reducing the risk of performance or availability problems. The service will not have any long-term persistence of the ontology, and is likely to work off of an in-memory cache of concepts generated from loading the Synapse ontology via the NCBO services.
- Synapse clients access Synapse Concept Services for information on Concepts.
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