CENtree Ontology Manager

SciBite’s ontology management platform CENtree provides a centralised, enterprise-ready resource for ontology management and transforms the experience of maintaining and releasing ontologies for research-led businesses. CENtree combines ease of use with cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques to assist users, for example, by suggesting possible relationship connections for a given ontology class.

CENtree leverages machine learning techniques to support ontology management by suggesting parent classes, synonyms and relationship connections when adding new terms. This, along with CENtree’s flexibility to introduce customized changes, that can be annotated to communicate edits across teams, is vital in producing ontologies that meet your needs. Download the CENtree datasheet or watch our webinar on Mastering Enterprise Level Ontologies for People and Applications.

Key benefits of CENtree

Centralising Ontology Management

At SciBite, we’re an advocate of FAIR data. CENtree uses open standards ensuring there is no ‘lock in’ to proprietary language or formats when managing ontologies. Users can upload locally-stored ontology files from public repositories and can specify if an entire ontology or a more specific subset should be imported.

When working with ontologies, version control is critically important. In CENtree, if users edit public ontologies, the changes can be reconciled with new releases. A merged view of the combined ontology highlights any conflicts, enabling curators to focus on things that need to be addressed.

Simplifying visualisation and curation

As with most visualisation techniques, there is no single ‘best’ way to view an ontology that fits all users and all applications. Some applications benefit from a tree view, while views providing an easily digestible high-level summary, such as heat maps or bubble diagrams will make more sense for others.

Tools that present multi-relational ontologies in an easily consumable format have proved elusive. CENtree provides a simple interface to navigate and make common changes to ontologies, lowering the barrier for users to contribute to editing and reducing the bottleneck of having to rely on ontology experts.

We’ve designed a highly intuitive interface that allows users to easily add, replace or remove an ontology class, change its location in a hierarchy to reflect a new sub-class relationship, and enrich it with new metadata such as synonyms or text definitions.

Facilitating collaboration and integration

Ontologies by their mere definition should be around ‘shared knowledge’. In a global, multi-location business, collaboration is important as it’s a challenge to manage effectively. Therefore it’s increasingly common for there to be multiple contributors. However, ontologies are often managed in applications that lack traceability, which hinders collaborative working. From the outset, CENtree was built from the perspective of a multi-user environment.

Governance and provenance are an intrinsic part of the editing process. CENtree allows organisations to manage permissions by assigning roles; therefore, issues with the same term being edited by two different people simultaneously can be prevented.

Employing a Git-like approach, CENtree manages change with our custom versioning engine, empowering an organisation to keep current with the latest public versions, whilst internally adding new content such as extending with new classes or fixing errors.

We’ve designed a highly intuitive interface founded on a flexible API which can be directly integrated into existing systems. Combining ontology management and semantic analytics capabilities of SciBite’s platform offers a unique approach in managing scientific information in the journey to clean data.

As a Software-as-Service (SaaS) solution, CENtree is secure and simple to deploy, includes seamless product upgrades, along with expanded infrastructure support and Professional Services to support integrations and ontology curation and advice. For more details take a look at our SaaS FAQs.

Latest features of CENtree

The latest CENtree 2.4 release contains two major new developments:

• Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) allow admins much stricter control and consistency in how terms are built consistently across your organization.
• The second major new feature is the addition of a SPARQL endpoint, that allows users query ontologies which are available as OWL/RDF. Please contact us if you have specific use-cases or requirements about integrating SPARQL queries with other systems

Other features also include:

• The ability to “Revert application ontology to previous snapshot(s)” if all rules point to source ontology snapshot(s)
• The support of “Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) for classes”
• A new drop-down menu in the CENtree client UI allowing you to 1. access the ontology summary, 2. view design pattern rules, 3. export the ontology and 4. launch the SPARQL editor.

Users can access full details of this release from our full release notes.

Get in touch with the team to learn more about CENtree.

Download the CENtree datasheet or watch our webinar on Mastering Enterprise Level Ontologies for People and Applications.

Download datasheet