Hi Travis, I'm a software engineer who had to use RDF, OWL, SPARQL and jena for the first time recently for my master thesis. Also, I had no previous experience building a whole application in java. I have more than 10 years experience but never did semantic web technologies or java before, although I knew the language.
My first steps were to read the w3c recommendations for RDF, RDFS and OWL then I played some with Protege following their "pizza" tutorial to see how all that work and fit together. It didn't take long, I don't remember how much exactly but it was fast, I'm talking of days here, maybe 2 weeks at most. Then, after reading the Jena documentation, I started the implementation of a web service interface for CRUD + several data retrieval operations on the ontology stored in a TDB dataset. That took a little longer but after a month it was up and running. The longuest part was to design the ontology. Of course my experience is in the context of a masters, it's not a professional application but it gives you an idea. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions. Regards, Emmanuelle On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Tripp, Travis S <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you, Milorad. > > Everybody else, > > One of the concerns I have is what the learning curve is for a team now to > Jena / RDF/s and OWL. I don't want to bring this into the team and have them > declare it a failure because the learning curve was too high. Any idea of > how long it takes for a software engineer to be somewhat functional with Jena > and RDF? > > Thanks, > Travis > > -----Original Message----- > From: Milorad Tosic [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 3:22 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Is Jena / RDF / OWL the right fit? > > Hi Travis, > > GENI project [1] have developed OWL extension of the NDL (Network Description > Language) [2] set of ontologies. You may find it informative as well as > useful for your purpose particularly NDL-OWL since it has extensions for > computational infrastructure. > > Regards, > Milorad Tosic > > > > [1] https://geni-orca.renci.org/trac/wiki/NDL-OWL > [2] http://www.science.uva.nl/research/sne/ndl > > > > >>________________________________ >> From: "Tripp, Travis S" <[email protected]> >>To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> >>Sent: Thursday, February 7, 2013 12:06 AM >>Subject: Is Jena / RDF / OWL the right fit? >> >>Hello all, >> >>I am on a project where we are investigating a new OASIS spec called TOSCA. >>I am looking for advice on whether or not it would make sense to leverage RDF >>/ OWL and that we can then use Jena to store the whole ontology and use it >>for querying and performing searches against. >> >>It has a concept of requirements and capabilities which allow you to use >>capabilities to describe the capabilities of an entity and then can use a >>requirements document to find entities the provide the needed capabilities. A >>capability typically will be related to concepts like hardware, software, >>etc. For example, I may have a capability of Java. The java capability >>might have properties like JAVA_HOME. It could have descendants for specific >>versions of Java (Java 6, Java 7, etc) with descendent specific properties. >>Or I may have a capability called block storage and the storage will have a >>minimum size and maximum size associated with it. A capability is essentially >>something that can have hierarchy (e.g. Ubuntu can inherit from Linux), >>traversal ordering (Java 6 comes before Java 7), may have quantity associated >>with it (Memory), and may have available properties (INSTALL_DIR). >> >>The TOSCA spec itself has a language for describing capabilities and >>requirements in their format, which I have attached. It also doesn't provide >>any specification on how to process the capabilities and requirements. Below >>is another example snippet from the TOSCA primer working draft: >> >>In TOSCA, requirements and capabilities allow to define dependencies between >>node types. For example, the following >>"ApacheWebApplicationContainerCapability" capability type allows to express >>the capability of a node type to serve as a runtime container for an Apache >>web application; note, that the capability type inherits from the >>"WebApplicationContainerCapability". Each node type that includes a >>CapabilityDefinition of this type warrants that it can serve as a container >>for Apache web applications. >> >>What I am curious is whether or not it would make sense to have the ontology >>of capabilities and requirement internally stored in a format like RDF / OWL >>and that we can then use Jena to store the whole ontology and use it for >>querying and performing searches against. We would then support a translation >>format to the TOSCA format on demand. I don't want to kill a fly with a >>sledgehammer, but also don't want to reinvent anything. Any thoughts on this >>would be appreciated. >> >>Secondarily, are there any available ontology libraries that we could use to >>bootstrap our library of capabilities / requirements? For example RDF or OWL >>ontologies that already have a standard description of database vendors and >>properties? >> >>I hope this isn't an abuse of the mailing list, but I certainly appreciate >>any guidance that can be provided. >> >>-Travis >> >> >>
