ABC Metadata Model Constructor

The ABC Ontology

The ABC metadata model is a result of the DSTC (Australia), JISC (UK), and NSF (US) funded Harmony Project.  The model has been developed to provide a common conceptual model to facilitate interoperability between metadata ontologies from different domains.  Two useful and complete references on the ABC model are:

• C. Lagoze and J. Hunter, "The ABC Ontology and Model," Journal of Digital Information, 2 (2), 2001, http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i02/Lagoze/. 
• ABC Model expressed as an RDF schema

Overview of the Constructor

The ABC Metadata Model Constructor is a pure java RDF based tool that allows construction of, storage of,  and experimentation with ABC models.  Because the Constructor makes use of RDF schema to describe the semantics of metadata ontologies, it is possible to construct more domain specific vocabularies that build on the ABC base ontology, dynamically load them in the Constructor, and then build models that make use of them.  It also possible to dynamically load other vocabularies described in RDF such as unqualified Dublin Core or qualified Dublin Core and use them in models.  

A screen shot of a small model built with the constructor is shown below:

Resources

The following resources are available for people wishing to experiment with the constructor:

• Help files describing constructor functions and UI.
• ReadMe file describing how to configure and run the constructor.
• abc.zip containing executable java class files, help files, and auxiliary files
• abcJBuilder.zip containing source files set up as a Borland JBuilder project.

Caveats

The ABC Metadata Model Constructor is ongoing experimental work.  It is distributed as is with no guarantees and without support.  Users of the software are assumed to have knowledge of Java, RDF, and basic ontology and metadata principles.  The software has run successfully on various flavors of Windows, but since it is written in pure java it should easily port to other operating systems on which Java is supported.

Acknowledgements

The ABC Metadata Model Constructor the result of a Master's project by David Lin in the Cornell Computer Science Department, under the direction of Carl Lagoze.   Full acknowledgements to Jane Hunter for her role as co-creator of the ABC model.  The constructor builds on the jena toolkit that is part of the HP Labs semantic web activity.  Funding for work on the Constructor comes from National Science Grant 9905955.