Rightscom (a UK-based media and rights consultancy), is working with Articulate Software (a formal ontology consultancy) and with another system developer to create a large-scale metadata integration and transaction management system, founded on an ontology-based metamodel. Previous versions of this system have utilized lightweight schema and conventional Semantic Web technologies such as OWL. This has become unwieldy, and does not take advantage of latest technologies. Our current version employs formal ontology development in the logical language of SUO-KIF and involves reuse of an extension of a large formal ontology – the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) - and its associated ontology management system, called Sigma. In particular, integration with a large ontology will give the Rightscom model greater coverage of more domains and expand business opportunities to supporting more kinds of transaction management applications. By utilizing an open source technology core, Rightscom will be able to leverage a larger and more robust set of technologies for our clients than would be possible with a proprietary system developed entirely in house. A key challenge in this work is maintaining customer-specific vocabularies and descriptions that are more appropriate in different contexts than the generic explanations in SUMO, that also conform to the central SUMO model.
Mastering universal transaction management system (UTMS) with software patterns
