Pellet—The Open Source OWL DL Reasoner.

Home→ OwlSight: A very lightweight OWL ontology browser→ OwlSight Readme

OwlSight v.50, http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/

Loading Ontologies

To load an ontology, select “File->Load Ontology” and either enter the URL of the ontology you wish to load, or paste the text of the ontology in RDF/XML format into the specified area, then hit the “Browse” button to load your ontology into OwlSight. Please note that local ontologies, i.e. those located on your machine, cannot be loaded. OwlSight will only load ontologies accessible via the public WWW.

OwlSight caches ontologies for a short period of time. If you would like to circumvent the cached copy, if there is one, uncheck the “Use Cached Copy” checkbox in the “Load Ontology” Dialog, otherwise, OwlSight will use a cached copy if one is available. Avoiding the cache is useful if you are making incremental changes to your ontology and are browsing them with OwlSight.

Bookmarks

OwlSight provides a set of default bookmarks to some OWL ontologies. To browse one of the bookmarked ontologies, just select the name of the bookmark you’d like to browse from the “Bookmarks” menu and OwlSight will load the specified ontology.

You cannot presently specify your own bookmarks or create new ones; however, OwlSight does support GRDDL-based Ontology Repositories, which are like online bookmarks which OwlSight can load on the fly. Please refer to the “Ontology Repository Support” section for more information.

Browsing an Ontology

Once an ontology is loaded, select any class, property, or individual you wish to view from the tabbed view on the left and see the information about the selected object in the entity panel in the main application area. Axioms and information about the resources are hyperlinks, so you can follow the references by clicking on the name of the resource you’d like to view next. This will display the selected resource in the entity panel.

Explanations

Inferred axioms have a “Why?” button next to them which allows you to get a explanation as to why the inference was made from the Pellet reasoner. Just hit the “Why?” button and a dialog will pop-up showing you the explanation for the inference. Please note that when there are multiple explanations for an inference, we only show up to the first five. If more explanations exist, they will not be displayed.

Ontology Repository Support

OwlSight supports GRDDL based ontology repositories which allow you to import a set of ontology bookmarks on the fly. You simply select “Ontology Repository->View Ontology Repo” and enter the URL of your ontology repository. The bookmarked ontologies will be loaded and added to the bottom of the “Ontology Repository” menu. To load one of the bookmarked ontologies, simply select the menu item corresponding to the ontology you would like to load.

For more information on how to create an ontology repository, please refer to the ontology repository documention.

Passing Parameters to OwlSight

If you’d like to make a link to OwlSight on a webpage which points to a specific ontology you’d like people to browse with OwlSight, you can pass in the “ontology” parameter to the OwlSight URL:

http://pellet.owldl.com/owlsight/?ontology=http://protege.cim3.net/file/pub/ontologies/koala/koala.owl

OwlSight will load the ontology at the specified URL and you can begin browsing it immediately. Similarly, if you have an ontology repository you’d like to have loaded on start-up, you can use the “repository” parameter:

http://pellet.owldl.com/owlsight/?repository=http://localhost:8080/grddl-test.html

This will load the ontology repository at the specified location when OwlSight starts up. This will allow users to “bookmark” their favorite ontologies with OwlSight.

Using Pronto

The latest versions of OwlSight support Pronto which is a probabilistic reasoning extension to Pellet. There are two probabilistic ontologies pre-bookmarked, which you will find in the “Bookmarks” menu. These bookmarks are prefixed with “[Pronto]” to signify they are probabilistic ontologies. If you wish to load your own probabilistic ontology, open the Load Ontology dialog, enter in the ontology text or its URL, check the “Probabilistic Ontology” box, and hit “Browse.” OwlSight will use Pronto to load the probabilistic ontology and you will be able to browse the ontology as you would with any regular ontology, but you will also be able to view the probabilistic contraints in the ontology as well as get explanations for the probabilities shown in OwlSight.