An experimental Ontology Server for an Information Grid environment

Semantic web and grid technologies offer a promising approach to facilitate semantic information retrieval based on heterogeneous document repositories. In this paper the authors describe the design and implementation of an Ontology Server (OS) component to be used in a distributed contents management grid system. Such a system could be used to build collection document repositories, mutually interoperable at the semantic level. From the contents point of view, the distributed system is built as a collection of multimedia documents repository nodes glued together by an OS. A set of methodologies and tools to organize the knowledge space around the notion of contents community is developed, where each content provider will publish a set of ontologies to collect metadata information organized and published through a knowledge community, built on top of the OS. These methodologies were deployed while setting up a prototype to connect about 20 museums in the city of Naples (Italy).