Scientists and researchers often use ontologies to describe their data, to share and integrate this data from heterogeneous sources. Ontologies are formal computer models that describe the main concepts and their relationships in a particular domain. Ontologies are usually authored by a community of users with different roles and levels of expertise. To support collaboration among distributed teams and to provision for distinct authoring requirements of each of the user roles and of individual users, we designed a configurable Web-based ontology editor, WebProtege. WebProtege extends Protege, a widely popular ontology editor with more than 150,000 registered users. The user interface layout and configuration for WebProtege is model-based and declarative: we represent it in a knowledge base, with an ontology defining its structure, and linking the interface configuration to the users, their roles, and access policies. We will discuss how the knowledge base driven configuration of the user interface supports the reuse and modularization of layout configurations. Such configuration is also highly flexible and extensible, and is easier to manage than many traditional approaches.

Today, distributed teams collaboratively create and maintain more and more ontologies. To support this type of ontology development, software engineers are introducing a new generation of tools. However, we know relatively little about how existing large-scale collaborative ontology development works and what user workflows the tools must support. In this paper, we analyze our experience in supporting several such projects. We describe a visual and interactive project-management tool that we have developed, which helps ontology developers explore historical ontology change and discussion data. We present the results of qualitative and quantitative studies of the collaborative activity associated with three large-scale ontology-development projects. Based on the analysis, we conclude that domain and ontology experts have different patterns of ontology editing behavior, which has important implications for ontology-development tools.

Optimal synthesis of reversible functions is a non-trivial problem. One of the major limiting factors in computing such circuits is the sheer number of reversible functions. Even restricting synthesis to 4-bit reversible functions results in a complexity explosion (16! ≈ 244 functions). The output of such a search alone, counting only the space required to list Toffoli gates for every function, would require over 100 terabytes of storage.

We explore how to support the creation of customized visualizations of ontology instance data through the specification of ontology mappings. We combine technologies from the disciplines of software modeling and ontology engineering. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by extending an existing ontology mapping tool, CogZ, to translate ontology mappings into software model transformation rules. The tool uses these transformations to automatically convert domain instance data into data that conforms to a model describing a visualization. After this transformation, a visualization of the domain instance data is generated.

We study the problem of the practical realization of an abstract quantum circuit when executed on a quantum hardware. By practical, we mean adapting the circuit to particulars of the physical environment which restricts/complicates the establishment of certain direct interactions between qubits. This is a quantum version of the classical circuit placement problem. We study the theoretical aspects of the problem and also present empirical results that match the best known solutions that have been developed by experimentalists. Finally, we discuss the efficiency of the approach and the scalability of its implementation with regard to the future development of quantum hardware.

We study the problem of the practical realization of an abstract quantum circuit when executed on quantum hardware. By practical, we mean adapting the circuit to particulars of the physical environment which restricts/complicates the establishment of certain direct interactions between qubits. This is a quantum version of the classical circuit placement problem. We study the theoretical aspects of the problem and also present empirical results that match the best known solutions that have been developed by experimentalists. Finally, we discuss the efficiency of the approach and scalability of its implementation with regards to the future development of quantum hardware.