Pellet—The Open Source OWL DL Reasoner.

OwlSight Ontology Repository Description

Michael Grove—http://clarkparsia.com

OwlSight provides a simple mechanism for importing ontology repositories via GRDDL; in this case an ontology repository is essentially a list of URLs of OWL ontologies for browsing in OwlSight, which are loaded on the fly.

Using OwlSight in this way is simple:

  1. Embed links to ontologies in an existing or new web page using one of the GRDDL supported formats.
  2. Point OwlSight at that page.
  3. There is no third step.

In our example below, we’ve embedded repo metadata in a webpage using RDFa. Since OwlSight uses Jena’s GRDDL library for reading in the GRDDL pages and extracting the RDF, the only requirement is that you use a GRDDL format supported by Jena’s library.

For the remainder of the example, the namespace “owlsight” refers to http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/owlsight/.

Each ontology in the repo must be asserted to be an owlsight:Ontology. Each owlsight:Ontology has two required properties: owlsight:label (or owlsight:title) and owlsight:url.

owlsight:url is the physical URL of the ontology; OwlSight will load the ontology from that URL. owlsight:label is the display property for the ontology within OwlSight; this is how OwlSight will refer to the ontology. If the owlsight:Ontology has only an owlsight:title, we’ll use that as the label, so you need to have one or the other.

There are other properties which you can use to describe your ontology, which will be displayed in OwlSight:

The RDF Schema for the OwlSight ontology repository is available.

Now, an example of a simple web page, which represents a ontology repository, marked up using RDFa.


<html
  xmlns:owlsight="http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/owlsight/" 
  xmlns:rdf  ="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
  xmlns:grddl='http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#'>

  <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
    <title>My Ontology Repo</title>
    <link rel="transformation" href="http://ns.inria.fr/grddl/rdfa/2008/03/28/RDFa2RDFXML.xsl"/>
  </head>

<body>
    <span instanceof="owlsight:Ontology" about="#koala" type="rdf:type">
      <a rel="owlsight:url" href="http://protege.cim3.net/file/pub/ontologies/koala/koala.owl">
            <span property="owlsight:label">Koala</span>
      </a>
      <span property="owlsight:title">Koala Ontology</span>
      <span property="owlsight:owlVersion">OWL 1.0</span>
      <span property="owlsight:version">1.01</span>
        <span property="owlsight:description">The Koala Ontology from the Protege ontology library.</span>
        <span rel="owlsight:creator" href="http://www.example.org/not_me">Not me</span>
    </span>

    <br/>

    <span instanceof="owlsight:Ontology" about="#pizza">
      <a rel="owlsight:url" href="http://www.co-ode.org/ontologies/pizza/2007/02/12/pizza.owl">
            <span property="owlsight:label">Pizza</span>
      </a>
      <span property="owlsight:title">Pizza Ontology</span>
      <span property="owlsight:owlVersion">OWL 1.0</span>
        <span property="owlsight:creator">John Doe</span>
      <a rel="owlsight:seeAlso" href="http://www.pizzahut.com">Pizza Hut</a>
      <a rel="owlsight:seeAlso" href="http://www.dominos.com">Dominos Pizza</a>
    </span>

</body>
</html>

Using the RDFa transformation specified in the head element of the web page, this is turned into this block of RDF (in N3 here for legibility):


@prefix owlsight:  <http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/owlsight/> .
@prefix rdf:     <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .

<http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/owlsight/#koala>
      a       owlsight:Ontology ;
      owlsight:creator <http://www.example.org/not_me> ;
      owlsight:description "The Koala Ontology from the Protege ontology library."^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:label "Koala"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:owlVersion "OWL 1.0"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:title "Koala Ontology"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:url <http://protege.cim3.net/file/pub/ontologies/koala/koala.owl> ;
      owlsight:version "1.01"^^rdf:XMLLiteral .

<http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/owlsight/#pizza>
      a       owlsight:Ontology ;
      owlsight:creator "John Doe"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:label "Pizza"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:owlVersion "OWL 1.0"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:seeAlso <http://www.pizzahut.com> , <http://www.dominos.com> ;
      owlsight:title "Pizza Ontology"^^rdf:XMLLiteral ;
      owlsight:url <http://www.co-ode.org/ontologies/pizza/2007/02/12/pizza.owl> .

OwlSight will use this repository description to create menu choices in the “Ontology Repo” menu in OwlSight. You can view the information contained in the ontology repository by selecting the “View Ontology Repository” item from the “Ontology Repository” menu. If you need to clear the repository and load a new one, use the “Reset Ontology Repository” item from the menu.

Note: ontology repository information is saved in a cookie in your browser and will be loaded each time you start owlsight. you can clear the repository by using the “Reset Ontology Repository” option.

Please feel free to check out (or use) our example repository or view it directly in OwlSight.

Launch OwlSight Version 0.52 - May 5, 2008

Features