Multiple ontology workspace management and performance assessment

This paper describes the development of a multiple ontology workspace management system and its performance assessment. This management system provides users with their own ontology workspace as a repository. It aims to facilitate the storage and manipulation of ontology models for knowledge driven manufacturing execution systems. The system uses Jena TDB API to maintain the file system on the server and utilizes Spring framework to provide RESTful Web services to expose functionalities to the users such as user account creation, ontology model upload and SPARQL query services. Besides the Web interface for the interaction between the user and the system, the system also provides Web service endpoints that are compatible with other query engines based on Graph Store HTTP Protocol defined in standard SPARQL 1.1. User authentication is also introduced in the system in order to keep the privacy and integrity of the user data. In the end the performance is tested to evaluate its usability. The developed system offers adequate performance for a large number of users and enables the users to store and retrieve information of ontology anywhere as long as internet is available. As the result, it improves the availability of ontology as an important role in knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition and knowledge driven manufacturing systems.