RDFS/OWL Strategy for TC Review

Owned by Kelly A Chatain (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 28, 2018
2 min read


  1. Eric explores further the reading and understanding of the Drupal XMI - diagnostics on the model to check types are coherent.
  2. Emitting OWL that uses properties as defined in DDI model directly (no external namespaces) - isomorphic easy to roundtrip
    Bringing in TC:
  3. Focus should be on strategy and documentation of algorithms/approaches. Creation of tools could be part of review but not critical for prototype.
  4. Review of the basic RDF-S/OWL representation
  5. Decide which foreign namespaces we want to use
  6. Write or document something that converts from XML to RDF (in practice the model always has some sort of implementation so "going through the model" may be just a conceptual approach. XMI describes the model but not an instance of metadata.)
  7. Question how design patterns are realized in the binding, especially the properties. Too many properties make it more difficult for software development. Eric will write a short document on this.
  8. Question if package names are represented in some way in the ontology. Package recognition: Useful in OWL for navigation. The use of packages and functional views could be confusing. Look at the requirement "supporting navigation". Is the package useful for this or would something else be more effective.
    1. Options are: not at all, package classes as subclass of the package as class, ontologies for each package with a specific namespace. 
    2. In this context, there was the understanding that all DDI classes are in one large ontology with one namespace. Functional Views could be represented by specific ontologies which have no own classes but use a subset of classes of the large DDI ontology.
  9. Review of the three documents on the RDF-S/OWL Team wiki page. Decisions on rules which should be implemented. Rules should be documented for review by TC.
  10. Solution of functional views.
  11. Approach for including the class documentation in the ontologies
  12. Packaging and possibly integration in the production framework (not necessarily required if the model and XMI export stays frozen)
  13. Protégé is one type of validation. Other forms of validation should be noted if know or a statement that we need to determine the types of validation needed.