A preview of the basic Dictionary View in ThinkCap. Resemblance with Google is fully intentional.

ThinkCap is a web application that provides user interfaces over a a remote, multi-ontology knowledge base. It is designed to meet the needs of non-technical as well as technical users.

Thinkcap can be used straight out of the box as a collaborative knowledge portal, allowing remote users of diverse disciplines and technical levels to develop shared conceptualization that are automatically formalized into OWL or RDFS ontologies. Users can search for concepts using a sophisticated text search that indexes concept descriptions as well as related web resources or documents. Concepts that are found can be explored in several ways, including graphical concept maps. Concepts that are not found can be submitted for inclusion, in more or less formal ways according to the technical level of the user.

ThinkCap is also a knowledge portal toolkit that allows extensive customization. By modifying or creating new thinkcap templates and/or extension plug-ins, sophisticated knowledge-based applications can be developed. These include:

	customized knowledge explorers, whose main entry point is as simple and familiar as a Google search, but can also allow interactive graphical knowledge maps (through our GrOWL toolkit) and sophisticated reasoning;
	custom collaborative knowledge editors, which can be used to consensually develop formal ontologies while hiding all technicalities under the restricted administrator interface;
	knowledge-based databases, with automatic generation of search interfaces and query forms from ontologies, connecting to any SOAP-based database server.
	ThinkCap can be used as a web-accessible knowledge repository to be used by applications and online services. Specially crafted URLs retrieve the latestversion of all the ontologies being developed and maintained in the ThinkCap application.

Development of ThinkCap has started in September 2005, based on an analysis of needs from several communities. There is no software release yet, although the software archive is available in CVS at Sourceforge. This page is only a stub for a more extensive description to come. Please stay tuned and feel free to ask if you want to know more sooner.