Re: OWL2 serialized as JSON?

Hi Michael,

Yes I agree, this is what Bijan and I were circling around in the original
discussion. There were questions as to how "S-expressiony" the mapping
would be (like OWL-XML) vs having named parameters. I think the latter
makes sense.

The additional JSON format I am proposing would be structurally different
but semantically equivalent or a well-defined subset, and it would be aimed
at a different use case (e.g. bioinformatics programmers who was simple
access to graph-representations of the existential graph of a T-Box)

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 12:13 AM, Michael Schneider <m_schnei@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> I don't know if anyone has been working on an OWL 2 JSON serialization
> yet, but I would expect this to be relatively straightforward, if one would
> create it along the lines of the OWL 2 Functional Syntax [1], in a similar
> way as it has already been done for the OWL 2 XML Serialization [2].
>
> [1] <https://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Syntax>
> [2] <https://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/XML_Serialization>
>
> Michael
>
> Am 04.10.2016 um 07:12 schrieb Chris Mungall:
>
>> Sorry, I can't just let the OWL-as-JSON thing go.
>> We've previously discussed the need for a JSON serialization independent
>> of RDF, and most of us who work with OWL agree this would be a useful
>> thing. I'm not sure there is any general uptake of this - I think there
>> has been a whittling down effect where anyone doing anything heavy duty
>> with OWL by now uses Java or a JVM language.
>> I still think the idea of a standard context for serializing OWL as
>> JSON-LD (below) is a good one, for a subset of users, but it exposes too
>> much of the RDF mapping of OWL.
>> In the bioinformatics community there is a need for something that is at
>> the same level of abstraction as OBO-format, but less broken, with
>> better OWL support, and serialized in JSON and/or YAML.
>> Here is what we have so far:
>> https://github.com/geneontology/obographs
>> And a post describing the motivation here:
>> https://douroucouli.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/a-developer-fri
>> endly-json-exchange-format-for-ontologies/
>>
>> On 6 Aug 2013, at 15:45, Chris Mungall wrote:
>>
>>     Remember this thread?
>>
>>     It stirred a bit of discussion regarding the relative merits of a
>>     direct serialization of OWL2 into JSON vs indirect via RDF. Probably
>>     somewhat academic, as here we are some time later and there don't
>>     seem to be many people publicly shunting around OWL as JSON. I have
>>     a translation I have been using for internal purposes but would like
>>     to abandon it in favor of something more standard.
>>
>>     I have shifted somewhat in the direction of an RDF-oriented
>>     solution. IMany of the OWL class axioms I work with tend to generate
>>     fairly verbose RDF (and consequently JSON derived from this).
>>     However, it's likely that *any* translation to JSON will likely be
>>     ugly for my axioms.
>>
>>     It seems JSON-LD has been gaining traction, and has nice features
>>     for avoid verbosity. Is there any move to have a standard @context
>>     (perhaps served from a standard URL) for OWL 2? Rather than having
>>     an abstract discussion about relative merits it might help to see
>>     some concrete examples of ontologies of varying levels of complexity
>>     translated to JSON and compacted as JSON-LD. I'm particularly
>>     interested in any JSON-LD tricks could be used for a more compact
>>     encoding of axiom annotations.
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Chris Mungall <cjmungall@lbl.gov
>>     <mailto:cjmungall@lbl.gov>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>         On Apr 7, 2011, at 5:54 AM, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>>
>>         > On 7 Apr 2011, at 08:33, Jerven Bolleman wrote:
>>         >
>>         >> Hi Chris, All,
>>         >>
>>         >> I have the feeling that you are going about this the wrong
>>         way round.
>>         >> I would first write a compelling JS api to deal with OWL
>>         concepts. And later if necessary design an optimized
>>         serialization format.
>>         >
>>         > Actually this is pretty close to what I proposed to do.
>>         >
>>         > The structure spec defines a quite nice API for OWL ontologies:
>>         >       http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-syntax-20091027/
>>         > (The Manchester OWL API adheres to this.)
>>         >
>>         > The XML Serialization mirrors this closely:
>>         >
>>         http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-xml-serialization-20091027/
>>         >
>>         > All other serializations (Manchester Syntax, RDF syntax) have
>>         a mapping to the abstract model.
>>         >
>>         > Although there are some issues with things for serialization
>>         (e.g., prefixes). I'll try to separate these out (as I'm
>>         currently doing for XML).
>>         >
>>         > Thus, the idea is to produce something close to this (with
>>         perhaps a few tweaks) so that, e.g., the structural spec serves
>>         as documentation for the API.
>>         >
>>         > I would generally recommend this as the preferred way to
>>         handle additional mappings and concrete formats. That was
>>         certainly the intent of the design.
>>
>>         Hi Bijan. How is this progressing?
>>
>>         I've written some code on top of the OWL API that generates json
>>         from either expressions or axioms. The resulting json is fairly
>>         generic and loosely corresponds to OWL-XML. Anything that is not
>>         a URI or a literal is translated to a hash with a "type" key
>>         that maps to the axiom or expression type, and an "args" arr.
>>         This is mostly for internal purposes write now - I'd like to
>>         adopt whatever de facto standard there is out there.
>>
>>
>>         > Cheers,
>>         > Bijan.
>>         >
>>
>>
>>
>