Nanotechnology Ontology: Semantic Access to Information in the Nano World

Scientific progress in a domain depends greatly on making use of results of previous research activities. Like human beings, it is difficult for computers to encode and retrieve the expanding web information. The basic answer to this problem is to describe the information explicitly and semantically with ontology. The article presents a brief discussion of the study undertaken to design an ontology for Nanotechnology, which was developed by using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This paper further describes methodology opted to develop the Nanotechnology ontology, where a semantic structure of Nanotechnology thesaurus was utilised for its creation. The study has further presented the features of nMap software, which was developed specifically for the study by using VB. net as front-end tool and MS-access as back-end tool. Outcome of the study offers a semantic knowledge structure to Nanotechnology researchers in machine readable environment. Further, development of ontology in RDF format serves interoperability and will further support semantic interpretation by machines to facilitate human understanding.