OWL Ontology Graphing Program Available as Open Source

It has been forever since I last blogged on this site (more than a year, for which I feel terrible). I have been wrapped up in work for a customer whose details are proprietary, and I was also slowly working to create (what I hope will be valuable) ontology graphing software. I wished that the work on the graphing software would have been available sooner, but better late than never ... The graphing software is called OntoGraph, is finally at a point where it is acceptable to publish, and I can freely discuss it on the blog! So, here we go ...

You can check out the work at Nine Points Solutions' GitHub repository.

OntoGraph is a Spring Boot application for graphing OWL ontologies (yes, the title says this). It lets you go from XML/RDF, Turtle and several other OWL syntaxes to a custom, Graffoo, VOWL or UML-like diagram. For example, you can go from something like this (this excerpt comes from the Friend of a Friend, FOAF.rdf ontology - you can see the complete FOAF ontology at http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/index.rdf) ...



To ...



The above image is a VOWL rendering of FOAF.

OntoGraph is designed with a Bootstrap- and Backbone-based GUI (written in Javascript), interfacing with a RESTful API. The main program is written in Java. It operates by creating various GraphML outputs of a user-provided OWL ontology file. (Or, it also accepts a zip file of a set of ontology files). The program stores the ontologies in the Stardog triple store, then runs a series of queries to return the necessary information on the classes, properties, individuals... to be diagrammed. Layout of the resulting GraphML is handled by another program. (We recommend yEd.)

Four visualizations of ontology data can be generated:

• Custom format (defined to fit existing business or personal preferences)
• Graffoo
• UML-like
• VOWL

And, information can be segmented to display:

• Class-related information (subclassing, equivalent and disjoint classes, class restrictions, ...)
• Individual instances, their types, and their datatype and object property information
• Property information (datatype and object properties, functional/symmetric/... properties, domain and range definitions, ...)
• Both class and property information

Complete information about OntoGraph, how to run it, and issues and upcoming features are available at the GitHub repository. Also, there is a pre-publication version of a paper there, there explains OntoGraph and why it was created. (The paper will be available in the next issue of the Journal of Applied Ontology, from IOS Press.)

So, now that OntoGraph is finally published, I can start to blog about its components, design and design decisions, testing, and lots of other details. I just needed something concrete!

I hope that you find the program useful!

Andrea

2016 and continuing posts on ontologies

Well, 2015 seems to have gotten away from me. Over the last year, I have been working to design and implement several ontologies for policy-based management. The work is based on Complexible's Stardog graph database, with services accessed through a RESTful API, and with a front-end, single-page web application created with Bootstrap and Backbone. It has been a blast working with and learning all these technologies, and my new year's resolution is to get back into writing my blog and share some of my learnings.

Another thing that I am doing is related to the International Association for Ontology and Its Applications (IAOA). More specifically, I am a part of the Semantic Web Applied Ontologies Special Interest Group (SWAO SIG). The SIG is continuing the work of the 2014 Ontology Summit and facilitating discussions of ontologies and their development and application. I will be contributing to those discussions in 2016, and started with a short post on the various definitions of the term, ontology. Check out the SWAO link above for the discussion!

That's it for now. Happy 2016!

Andrea

Restarting my blog and research

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me over the past few years as I got consumed in projects and neglected my blog. That phase of my life was officially over in mid-December (2013). I just joined a small consulting firm, Nine Points Solutions. I now have the opportunity to both consult and to continue my research into extracting and managing policies in support of security, configuration and operations. I am very excited to have the opportunity to do this, and will share what I am doing and what I learn (when I can).

As part of restarting the blog, I did go through and clean up my overviews and list of blogs that I read. Please take a look and tell me about any blogs that I missed and that you find valuable. I didn't change the overall design of the site, because it works for me. But, let me know if that is not true for you, my readers.

Lastly, I want to bring everyone up-to-speed (at a very high level) on my work over the last two+ years ... I had the opportunity to architect and create a policy-based management system based on OWL ontologies and using semantic technologies. The system was written in Java and used the Stardog triple store from Clark and Parsia. Needless to say, I made mistakes, got a lot of help from the Stardog developers, and learned a lot. I will be sharing some of that learning in future posts.

Thanks again! I am looking forward to writing more in the coming weeks!

Andrea