To figure out how Ontos API works, use our HTTP binding in order to get started with the web service and your personal dictionary. Proceed as follows:

1. Log-in to your personal dictionary at http://test.ontos.com/dix in order to initialize the system for your user.
2. Run a request to authenticate:
   http://test.ontos.com/token?j_username=YOUR_USERNAME&j_password=YOUR_PASSWORD.

The request will return a session token (YOUR_TOKEN).

3. Run a request to the NLP processor:

   http://test.ontos.com/api/miner?jsessionid=YOUR_TOKEN&query={
"get":"process",
"ontology":"api.common.english",
"format":"NTRIPLES",
"text":"Ontos AG participated in the Semantic Conference in San Jose and is planning to join ESTC2009 in Vienna this year."
}

   This request will return a set of triples in JSON format. The processor recognized “Semantic Conference” as a conference, but didn’t do so for “ESTC2009″.

4. Sign in to your personal dictionary at http://test.ontos.com/dix, select the instance type “Conference” and add ESTC2009.
5. Re-run the request to the NLP processor. Now it will have recognized “ESTC2009″ as a conference as well.

See full documentation to learn more about what Ontos API can do.

If you copy & paste HTTP requests (e. g. directly form the doc) into the browser’s address bar, be aware to replace the hash sign (#) by %23. Otherwise the request will be broken by the browser.

We are happy to announce that the beta version of Ontos API is now pushed on-line together with documentation and some quick demos. More demos and showcases will come in due time (oh, we hope they will also come from you—yes! feel free to drop us a link to your own apps based on Ontos API).

And now a couple of short notices about our one-day-old kid:

• to get an API key please request one here, and shortly after this you’ll get a message with a user ID and a password which you can use in your API calls
• in the beta phase we have all functions for the ontology-driven text analysis and reading the RDF store; in the next releases we will add the following features:
  • new languages (German, French and Russian will come as soon as they are available but no later than by the end of October 2009)
  • full personalization (personal database linked to your account for new dictionaries and ontology’s—scheduled for November 2009)

Feel free to ask us whatever you wanna know about the new Ontos API! Leave comments to this entry or e-mail us at support@ontos.com.