D8.2: MSD Ontology

The deliverable contains the draft of the ontology that the MultiScaleHuman Consortium will adopt to fulfil the agreed goals of: (i) organizing data and knowledge relevant to the project according to a shared view of the multi-scale domain of MSH; (ii) browse and retrieve data and knowledge according to different perspectives, as reflected by the various expertise and interests of the Consortium Partners; (iii) support a semantics-driven and knowledge-driven visualization of data and knowledge, coupling information visualization and scientific visualization techniques. The ontology design started later than planned for two main reasons: (i) the requirement gathering phase took longer than planned originally, as most of the Consortium Partners had little, if any, experience on knowledge management methods; (ii) the recruitment of the ESR responsible for the ontology design was quite complex due to the termination of the first contract after only three months of work. For these reasons, the current status of the MSH ontology is still preliminary. At the same time, the work done on the requirements analysis (2nd phase) and state-of-the-art analysis on ontology integration allowed us to decide on the best methodology to adopt for the enrichment of the ontology, which will proceed and continue in the next years. This deliverable describes the second phase of the requirement analysis (Sect. 2) and the approach for the modularized ontology design and integration (Sect. 3), the main elements of the MSH Ontology (Sect. 4). Finally (Sect. 5), we outline future work on the use of the MSH ontology for knowledge visualization. Answers to the interviews with the MSH Partner are reported in the Annexes.