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Ontologies

Semantic Treehouse offers support for importing, viewing and exploring ontologies. Note that Semantic Treehouse is not an ontology editor. Most users start with an existing ontology and use Semantic Treehouse to explore the ontology in a user-friendly way. The Wizard is used to create message models out of them.

This section details the process of adding ontologies and the requirements on the input ontologies. The Wizard functionality is described in the Wizard section.

Adding an ontology​

Adding an ontology happens through the following steps:

Use the triple dots menu to access the Edit ontology version screen.

Edit ontology version

The 'Edit ontology version' screen is divided into several tabs. The Ontology tab and the Used by tab are specific to the ontology specification type.

The Ontology tab holds a text area to specify the ontology. Typically, users will have created their ontology beforehand and copy-paste them into the text area. After clicking outside of the text area, Semantic Treehouse will try to parse the ontology and return a success or error message through.

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Semantic Treehouse supports ontologies formatted in common RDF serialization like Turtle, RDF/XML, JSON-LD, or N3. This can be any knowledge graph (model + instance data), including conceptual models expressed in RDFS, OWL, SHACL, SKOS or a combination of those.

One of the strengths of Semantic Treehouse is that new message models are easily created by maintainers, with the ontology as the starting point. The Used by tab allows maintainers to see which message models are importing this ontology.

See all message models that import this ontology

What you can do with an ontology​

In the 'View an ontology' section three different ways a user can explore an ontology are described. Here we provide some more background on the functionalities:

  • Download/export the ontology in any RDF serialization. Turtle is the default format. Full support. Everything that is provided in the RDF graph is processed. We store the original graph content and parse and serialize using the open-source EasyRdf library.
  • Visualize with WebVOWL (using export from export bullet). The visualization offered by the WebVOWL tool allows users to see the ontology as a graph, and offers filtering and search functionalities to reduce the overwhelming effect some large ontologies can have. The WebVOWL tool is limited to OWL constructs. The underlying library is OWL2VOWL which determines which constructs are included in the visualization.

Additionally maintainers can create a new message model from this ontology using the Wizard. Ontologies, or more specifically a certain Class in an ontology, can be used as a starting point to create a new message model. The Wizard section describes this approach in more detail, but it starts with creating a new message model from the '+' icon in the Specifications overview page.

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The Wizard importing an ontology has support for the following OWL/SHACL constructs: RDFS (nearly all constructs), OWL (most common constructs) and SHACL (common constructs). We parse the original graph content and pick constructs as documented in Wizard SHACL input and Wizard OWL input.