Re: Deploying an OWL ontology via an Web Services interface

On May 9, 2004, at 7:11 PM, Rob Atkinson wrote:

>
> 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.

The closest is the DIG interface.

http://dl-web.man.ac.uk/dig/

> 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,

Yes.

> update

It depends on what you mean. You can add to a class expression, or to  
the axioms.

> or delete classes

But there is no deletion.

> 2) find references that directly depend on a class

I don't know what this means.

> 3) query

At least a standard set of DL queries.

> 4) ideally, insert an entire OWL ontology including relationships to  
> pre-existing classes...

Yes.

> 5) ... which implies having a stable URI to reference items within the  
> deployed ontology in the first place

I don't understand this.

> 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.

The DIG interface is incomplete, but it is implemented and deployed  
(see the oiled and protege editors for some examples).

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

Our group raised some of this as a requirement for the Data Access  
Working Group (DA-WG):
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004AprJun/ 
0286.html

Our reasoner, Pellet, also supporst some of this in a fairly crude, GET  
oriented sort of way:
	http://www.mindswap.org/2003/pellet/demo.shtml

We are working on a solution based on XPointer that would give you some  
useful URIs for parts of the ontology. Not a lot of this is trivial, or  
even straightforward, unless you are really working against something  
like the XML of a document.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Monday, 10 May 2004 09:50:44 UTC