Hi Nate, I'm not sure what you mean by an "ontology management workflow" exactly and I can't comment on whether your approach is a good one or not... but what we have done is to create our own ontology which as far as possible reuses or extends other pre-existing ontologies (e.g. central-goverment, dublin core etc.). This ontology consists of a load of classes, object properties and data properties which are used inside our actual data. The ontology (or TBox - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tbox) and data (or ABox - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abox) components exist as separate datasets and we have found it convenient to store them as separate named graphs within our triplestore - mainly so that the ontology component can be updated easily by dropping and reloading the graph.
We manage the ontology using Protege and I have to say I find modelling things in Protege saves me from wasting huge amounts of time as it forces me to model things up front before I start fiddling about with the data. I find the OntoGraf plugin particularly helpful when I need to visualise relationships and when discussing requirements with users. Protege also allows you to save the ontology as an RDF file which you can load straight into your triplestore (Jena TDB in our case). We also keep a number of named individuals in the ontology itself. These are for things that are entities but what I think of (coming from a Java background) as statics. They are the entities which are very unlikely to change and if they do then I am happy to edit them within the ontology. Hope that helps in some way. Rob Rob Walpole Email [email protected] Tel. +44 (0)7969 869881 Skype: RobertWalpolehttp://www.linkedin.com/in/robwalpole On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Nate Marks <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm trying to get my arms around an ontology management workflow. I've > been reading the docs on the Apache Jena site and a couple of books. I > was hoping to test my understanding of the technology by sharing my current > plan and gathering some feedback. > > Thanks in advance if you have the time to comment! > > > I intend to tightly manage a pretty broad ontology. Let's say it includes > assets, locations, people and workflows. > > I think I want to have a single "schema" file that describes the asset > class hierarchy and the rules for validating assets based on properties, > disjointness etc. > > Then I might have a bunch of other "data" files that enumerate all the > assets using that first "schema" file. > > I'd repeat this structure using a schema file each for locations, people, > workflows. > > Having created these files, I think I can use an assembler file to pull > them into a single model. > > Ultimately, I expect to query the data using Fuseki and this is where I get > a little hazy. I think the assembler can pull the files into a single > memory model, then I can write it to a tdb. > > Is that necessary, though? it's a simple bit of java, but I have the > nagging feeling that there's a shorter path to automatically load/validate > those files for Fuseki > > > Is this approach to organizing the files sound? >
