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Borislav Iordanov edited this page Mar 3, 2016 · 13 revisions

OWL in HyperGraphDB

The Ontology Web Language (OWL) 2.0 is a semantic web standard based on Description Logics (DL). More information on the W3C OWL 2.0 home page as well as at the OWL 2 Wikipedia topic.

The HGDBOWL module offers a complete, persistent, fully transactional implementation of the de facto standard OWLAPI for working with OWL ontologies. Each ontology is naturally represented as a sub-graph within a HyperGraphDB instance, thanks to the native nested graph support. Therefore:

  • Thus, arbitrarily large ontologies that don't necessarily fit in memory can be stored.

  • You can program against the standard OWLAPI, including using any reasoner of your choice and remain insulated from HyperGraphDB dependencies.

  • You can also make use of HyperGraphDB querying and graph traversal capabilities to retrieve ontological information.

  • Multiple ontologies can be independently stored in the same database.

  • You can freely mix ontologies persisted in a database with file-based ontology (one importing the other).

  • Of course, you can also open multiple database repository simultaneously, each which its own set of ontologies. This gives you a very fine-grained control of managing your ontology data at a fairly large scale.

Where to go next?

Versioning

Creating ontologies is like any other kind of software development activity, coding that is. We create a model of the world and it gets complex, we may need to collaborate with others, we will make mistakes and may want to revert back to a previous version of our model. So OWL development at a large scale is best done under a modern distributed version control system.

The HGDB-OWL module offers such a system with the following features:

  • Versioning and diffs performed at the axiom level, not text.
  • Standard push, pull, commit, revert etc. operations.
  • Branching & merging for collaborative parallel development.
  • Truly distributed P2P development (no centralized repository necessary).

Where to go next?

Protege Integration

The HyperGraphDB backed OWL implementation is also the foundation of a Protege plugin which exposes all that functionality in a natural way from the Protege UI. The Protege plugin makes it seamless to store very large ontologies in a graph database with the full support of distributed version control needed for large-scale ontology development by teams of any size.

The plugin's official page is at and the Github repository is at https://github.com/hypergraphdb/protegeowl

Where to go next?

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