Online Ontology editor with OWL API + DB?

Question

I’m working on a web ontology management system (OMS). The application should enable to create ontologies, to develop/edit them in an editor (part of OMS) and everything of course will run online in a browser. The editor should offer the possibility to run a reasoner (infer relations, detect inconsistence) and to evaluate SPARQL queries.

My idea was to use OWL API in the editor to work with the ontology (add/edit/remove classes/properties/individual etc.), to call the reasoner. So far so good. But then came the question: How and where to store the ontologies. I looked up some graph databases (for example Noe4j, Stardog) where I wanted to store the ontologies. But then I got stuck.

I can’t figure out how to get the ontologies from a graph DB to OWL API.

At the moment I’m not even sure, if my whole concept of using OWL API and a graph DB correct or possible is. I have the impression that I missed some important fact in the whole picture.

Should I use text files to save the serialized ontologies on the server and do not use graph DB's, or should do it the other way and remove OWL API from the design and use some other component?

I will be grateful for any help or hint!

Answer 1

Worth looking at WebProtege.

http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/WebProtege

If you want to fit a DB to the OWL API, then I would think the best way would be to implement an alternative DataFactory and OntologyManager which talks straight to the database. In fact, I am pretty sure this has been done already.

http://owldb.sourceforge.net/

And probably others.

Answer 2

ONT-API, which is Jena based OWLAPI-api implementation, opens a possibility to work with graph DBs (RDF stores), SPARQL and OWL2 at the same time. Also, there are ONT-D2RQ, that provides D2RQ mapping language and virtual graph, ONT-MAP for ontological mappings, and RDF-Protege - a desktop editor