Choice is good for users, but when too much choice becomes a problem, smart helpers are needed to choose the right option. In the world of services, there are often functionally comparable or even equivalent offers with differences only in some aspects such as pricing or fine-print regulations. Especially when using services in an automated way, e.g. for storing data in the cloud underneath a desktop or web application, users could care less about which services they use as long as the functionality is available and selected preferences are honoured (e.g. not storing data outside of the country).

The mentioned smart helpers need a brain to become smart, and this brain needs to be filled with knowledge. A good way to represent this knowledge is through ontologies. Today marks the launch of the consolidated WSMO4IoS ontology concept collection which contains this knowledge specially for contemporary web services and cloud providers. While still in its infancy, additions will happen quickly over the next weeks.

One thing which bugged me when working with ontologies was the lack of a decent editor. There are big Java behemoths available, which certainly can do magic for each angle and corner allowed by the ontology language specifications, but having a small tool available would be a nice thing to have. And voilà, the idea for the wsmo4ios-editor was born. It's written in PyQt and currently, while still far from being functional, 8.3 kB in size (plus some WSML-to-Python code which could easily be generated on the fly). The two screenshots show the initial selection of a domain for which a service description should be created, and then the editor view with dynamically loaded tabs for each ontology, containing the relevant concepts, relations (hierarchical only) and units.

The preliminary editor code can be found in the kde-cloudstorage git directory. It is certainly a low-priority project but a nice addition, especially considering the planned ability to submit service descriptions directly to a registry or marketplace through which service consumers can then select the most suitable offer. Know the service - with WSMO4IoS :)