Ontology in Rowlex

Question

I am trying to use Rowlex for the opencalais ontology found here http://www.opencalais.com/files/owl.opencalais-4.3a.xml

I have tried the zoo sample ontology and i am wondering how i can call the opencalais ontology fields.

Thank you very very much

Answer 1

I recommend you to use the ROWLEX OwlGrinder tool as a first step. This tool takes your ontology (you need to have the ontology downloaded as a local file to your computer) and generates you a .NET assembly. The OwlGrinder is similar in functionality to XSD.exe that generates you C# wrapper classes for your XSD schema or WSDL.exe (I am not sure about this name) that produces you proxy classes for your web service clients.

Please, take a look of the generated assemlies via the free Reflector tool. You will find 2 .NET classes generated for each of your ontology classes: a light and a full class. You can recognize them by the naming convention. If the ontology class is called "Address" then the .NET light class is also called "Address", while the full class will be called "Address_". I recommend to use the light classes. The difference is explained on the second half of this page.

On how to use these autogenerated classes see the following links:
- Creating an RDF graph complying to my ontology. You can save your RDF graph to a file by RdfDocument.ExportToXXX methods.
- Browsing an RDF graph that complies to my ontology
- Some additional explanation is in this SO question

ADD1:

I tried your target ontology myself. In the autogenerated classes, you get silly property names because the opencalais ontology does not follow the usual naming convention of separating the name of the property from the namespace by #. That makes the classes a somewhat more difficult to read. I will fix that in the next version of ROWLEX.

ADD2:

I also noticed an unexplainable bug with the latest version: The dll is being saved not to the user-selected folder, but to the folder where the OwlGrinder.exe is.