ePrOnto: OWL-based ontology for research information management

Interoperability is the challenge of getting processes to share and exchange information effectively. Service orientation relates to creating self-contained, self-describing, accessible, and open, computer services. Both these challenges relate to the representation of the data being exchanged/manipulated. There are various existing sources of research information in the University, for example, ePrints – the publications repository. Research information is complex, structured data, and the future requirements of it are only partially known. If we commit to one encoding, or even one representation language, later it may turn out to be inadequate or obsolete. Current work on these issues points to representing the data in an ontology.