Dr Crowder’s (right) paper considered the fact that Semantic Web searches for industrial applications are often very large and unearth a large pool of technical terminology. With this in mind, he and the co-authors of the paper developed three approaches to ontology presentations to limit the amount of information presented to the user at any one time.

"In this paper, we looked at the problem of ontology simplification for presentation in web applications," said Dr Crowder. "The ontology needed for web applications in technical domains are often very large. This is because of the vastness and complexity of the technical data captured in the ontology."

For example " in the aero-engine component ontology we have previously used for our document repository in, there are 160 direct subclasses of Part. These 160 classes have a further 1096 direct subclasses. All subclasses represent parts of an aero-engine, and must be made available to engineers using the web application. Furthermore, engine components are not the only domain concepts we require in our application."

The researchers implemented two of the proposed methods – an autocompletion text box, which attempts to anticipate users’ intention and completes their input using vocabulary from a predefined dictionary of words, and drop-down lists that allow users to choose one value from a list.

Both methods were made available to engineers and received positive and valuable feedback.

Co-authors on the paper were Dr Max Wilson, Dr David Fowler, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Dr Gary Wills and Dr Sylvia Wong, all from ECS. The work was part of the recently completed IPAS (Integrated Products and Services) project funded by the Technology Strategy Board and Rolls Royce.