The SHIMMER Project
What is the problem?
Current techniques for describing and finding biomedical services on the web are not adequate for a wide range of scenarios in science. Many services are difficult or impossible to find, because of primitive techniques used to match requests for services with advertisements in a central registry. This means the full value of the web of science is not currently being realised.
What is the proposed solution?
The shimmer project proposes and demonstrates a novel technique for semantically describing and matching services in e-science workflows, which has increased precision and recall when compared to alternative approaches. As part of this research, a suite of OWL ontologies have been developed that demonstrate this technique for semantically matching biomedical web services, within the context of the myGrid project and Taverna toolkit.
The shimmer solution supplements semantic descriptions of services with queries, to provide more precise and accurate advertisements of services which can then be matched more efficiently with users requests. The approach is described more fully in the publications below. This page provides a location for publishing the shimmer ontology, and the queries that demonstrate its use.
Who is the contact?
The main contact for this research project is Duncan Hull
Where does the name come from?
The project and ontology takes its name from the two possible meanings for the word shimmer, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a:
- Noun: A shimmering light or glow; a tremulous or flickering twilight. By analogy the shimmer ontology is designed to illuminate the process of service discovery in a web services registry, such as the one developed as part of the myGrid project.
- Noun: A person who inserts shims during work. In the physical world, a shim is a thin slip, usually of metal, used to fill up a space between parts subject to wear, to align or adjust the level of rails or pipes etc. By analogy, in the world of software engineering on the web, shim services are the software components used to align inputs and outputs of consecutive services in e-science workflows. The shimmer ontology was intially designed to describe and retrieve this particular class of services, although it is also has uses in other contexts, such as describing entire workflows of services.
Please note, this project is not related to do a different project at Manchester Computing with the same name, ShiMMer which is SHIbbolising MiMas rEsouRces.
Publications
- Duncan Hull, Evgeny Zolin, Andrey Bovykin, Ian Horrocks, Ulrike Sattler and Robert Stevens (2006) Deciding Semantic Matching of Stateless Services. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and Eighteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) Conference, Boston, MA, USA, July 16-20 (special track on AI and the Web)
- Duncan Hull, Robert Stevens, Phillip Lord, Chris Wroe and Carole Goble (2004) Treating shimantic web syndrome with ontologies. In First Advanced Knowledge Technologies workshop on Semantic Web Services (AKT-SWS04) KMi, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. (See Workshop proceedings CEUR-WS.org (issn:1613-0073) Volume 122 - AKT-SWS04)
- Duncan Hull, Katy Wolstencroft, Robert Stevens, Carole Goble, Matthew Pocock, Peter Li and Tom Oinn (2006) Taverna: A tool for building and running workflows of services In Nucleic Acids Research 34:W729-W732 (Web Server Issue).
