Deploying an OWL ontology via an Web Services interface

Hi

Apologies if there is an obvious answer to this, but I havent been able 
to locate it via browsing, searching or asking yet: is there a working 
group, standard, best practice or even published proprietary API for 
deploying an ontology via Web Services.

I am interested in the case of a community managed ontology, where 
working groups can be delegated to maintain parts of the ontology, all 
via a single web accessible repository. Applications would be able to 
search this repository as required.

I would like the ability to:
1) insert, update or delete classes
2) find references that directly depend on a class
3) query
4) ideally, insert an entire OWL ontology including relationships to 
pre-existing classes...
5) ... which implies having a stable URI to reference items within the 
deployed ontology in the first place

Maybe there is no API that makes sense, and its always only possible to 
think about publishing a single file, and using xlink to try to glue it 
all together - in which case there should be some serious thought 
somewhere about the query mechanisms you would use to perform typical 
ontology traversals. I'd be happy with a registry-friendly model where 
the transactions can be defined to be honest.

Can anyone point me to where such deployment issues are being worked out?

Regards
Rob Atkinson

Received on Sunday, 9 May 2004 19:18:15 UTC