Ontologies in QualiWare

This page is intended to help users model knowledge using the QualiWare GOWL implementation delivered in release 10.8 of QualiWare.

Prior to reading this page, it is recommended to read the Ontologies page which introduces beginners to ontologies, ontology engineering, and a quick presentation of the GOWL implementation.

As a remembering, GOWL provides users with graphic editing of ontologies, following the VOWL specification. Please refer to http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/v2/ to get a complete understanding of VOWL.

An ontology diagram example

We will use this diagram, the corresponding ontology, and its content as the basis for explaining the use of GOWL within the QualiWare environment

As a remembering, “Friend of a friend (FOAF)” is an ontology which resides at the “upper level” and defines a Person as an Agent and its relations with other persons, and various instances of Document which can be found on the web (publication, chat, homepage, …). As stated in its base description :

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) RDF vocabulary, described using W3C RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language.”

This ontology is published and licensed as a Creative Commons License at http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/

The intent of implementing this ontology is for both human and machine to navigate along the relationships which a Person has with others and its “presence” in the internet :

… If people publish information in the FOAF document format, machines will be able to make use of that information. If those files contain “see also” references to other such documents in the Web, we will have a machine-friendly version of today’s hypertext Web. Computer programs will be able to scutter around a Web of documents designed for machines rather than humans, storing the information they find, keeping a list of “see also” pointers to other documents, checking digital signatures (for the security minded) and building Web pages and question-answering services based on the harvested documents. …”

This ontology, as most of published ontologies, is written (defined and described) using the machine-readable language RDF/OWL. This is formal language which can be invoked and interpreted by applications to browse and analyze data about people (relationships to other people, and their presence – publications, various we accounts, … – in the internet) given that these data are referencing these vocabulary definitions.

An ontology is defined using annotations, classes, object properties, data-type properties and axioms.

This manual shows how these characteristics can be captured using GOWL and the defined corresponding QualiWare templates. These templates are named following a specific naming syntax such as “<name>:owl”. As an example, the naming of the ontology Class template is “Class:owl”.