Eon: An Owl Ontology to Collect, Expose, and Disseminate UTEP's Faculty Research Areas of Expertise

Searching for faculty members who are experts in specific research areas depends on the availability of appropriate keywords in personal websites, published articles, etc. Keyword searching has the disadvantage of depending on the lexical “match” executed by online search engines. The same challenge arises when faculty members try to find grants relevant to their research areas. Although grant descriptions may be published in websites such as Grants.gov, their classification is very general and they have to be filtered manually by users. The goal of this project is to use Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologies, to describe areas of expertise by means of a hierarchy of disciplines. This project involved the creation of an ontology to cover the CFDA (Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance) and specific areas of expertise of UTEP’s faculty members. The resulting ontology, named EON,  was created using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Protégé tool. EON currently contains 718 classes and 6055 axioms and is available at http://cybershare.utep.edu/ontology/i3/eon.owl. Annotations, such as labels and comments were added to each one of the classes to improve human readability and understanding. EON will facilitate the organization of information about researchers, projects, and research areas in UTEP based on a hierarchy of concepts. Furthermore, EON will be used as the backbone of the I3 Expertise system, an effort to collect, expose, and disseminate UTEP’s expertise information using cyberinfrastructure.