Mapping OWL Classes to their CRUD Services

Hi all,

I am building a small system and I'm trying to generate part of the
user interface by reading a rich Ontology ( OWL-DL ) of the domain. It
provides lots of useful information ( datatypes, cardinality,
properties, relations, etc ).

In general, there is a set of server side services that allow CRUD
operations on each OWL Class, for example

for the myNS:Person class the server exposes the following services:

C: createPerson( personVO )
R: getPersons( filters... ) // typical DAO style filters, by parameters
U: updatePerson( personVO )
D: deletePerson( personVO )

the same goes for other classes... there is an obvious pattern here.
The major differences between each class is usually the available
filters ( and sorting capabilities ) of the filler service ( the
getPersons(filters) ).

I am trying to identify the missing metadata that would allow me to
automate as much as possible... for example ( per owl class )

* generate tabular views with filters/sort/paging/etc
* generate detail ( view/edit ) per instance
* traverse relations transparently ( to another tabular view with the
related resources )

Basically, a mapping from owl classes/properties to services and a way
to describe the service capabilities ( filters, sorts, etc ).

Before starting from scratch... has anyone done anything like this before??
Does it ring any bells?

I have been digging into semantic web services and related stuff but
haven't found anything so far.

Note that the results of the services are simple arrays of value
objects... I can map them to RDF resources if I need to later. I am
doing all this just to see how far I can go in UI generation using an
ontology.

Thanks,
Aldo

-- 
::::: Aldo Bucchi :::::
mobile (56) 8 429 8300

Received on Monday, 28 August 2006 16:25:53 UTC