The tool was originally developed to solve a very specific problem for a specific user and as such, its general purpose usability may not yet be fully recognized.

The tool is currently used to map site ontological concepts to core(standard) ontological concepts. For example, for N number of organizations, there may be N different ontologies used at those sites. In order for those organizations to communicate with each other and query against each others' ontologies, there must be an agreed upon standard or core ontology. Then, each site ontology must be mapped to the core ontology so that we know that some concept A in ontology 1 is a synonym for concept B in the core ontology.

The SHRIMP tool allows users to import as well as create many-to-many mappings from site ontology concepts to core ontology concepts.

The SHRIMP tool is certainly a work in progress. Please help SHRIMP by creating and editing issues and downloading the source.

SHRIMP is implemented in Ruby on Rails 2.x and Ruby 1.8.6