Visualization of Ontology Contents - with Ontology Diagram and SWRL Debugger

From the latest release version, Fluent Editor includes a few new features that enhance visualization of ontology, which can help you navigate through the structure of your ontology more intuitively. Possibility of drawing a diagram of ontology is one of such features. Ontology diagrams graphically express relations between concepts and instances - also the materialized ones. 
Another new feature to be introduced is SWRL debugger. SWRL debugger shows binding of rules that took place during the reasoning process over your ontology. It is presented as a list of all the SWRL rules and bound instances. By running SWRL debugger, you can check how SWRL rules work on your ontology.

In this post, we will look through these two features further.

Fluent Editor 2014 R3 - Diagrams, SWRL debugger, Active Rules emulator...

Recently we have published an updated release of the Fluent Editor 2014 with few new great features many of you have requested so far. We want to make ontology development even easier and pleasant task! With new Fluent Editor you can instantly visualize your ontologies, better inspect ontology ecosystem with references, trace down SWRL rules and simulate server behavior. Here’s what’s new:

• Ontology Diagrams
• Rereference Diagrams
• Reference Explorer
• SWRL Debugger
• Active Rules emulator
• Proxy Configuration
• Performance improvements

How to explore SPARQL endpoint?

In this article you will learn: - how to explore SPARQL endpoint with Ontorion™ SPARQL Tools for Excel - about SPARQL autocomplete tool from Cognitum

Ontorion™ SPARQL Tools for Excel latest release offers two new features enriching the SPARQL experience. First one is Explore SPARQL endpoint tool, which enables to get a quick overview of the data content of the endpoint. Second is SPARQL autocomplete tool, which guides user throughout writing the query with intelligent autocomplete hints.

Motivation

A growing amount of data is made public via SPARQL endpoints. You can explore the data by asking SPARQL queries. One of the most famous SPARQL endpoints is DBpedia - a semantic version of Wikipedia. Many public institutions expose some of their data in such an open way as well. A good example is The Environment Agency of England and Wales, which publishes data about bathing water quality .
The basic building block of SPARQL data set is a triple. It is a statement of the form subject-predicate-object. Apart from that, the structure of the data can be quite loosely defined. Thus it may sometimes be difficult to explore a new SPARQL endpoint for the first time.

Using OWL Annotation in Fluent Editor

OWL Annotations together with SKOS and DcTerms form a widely used Thesaurus standard that help the ontology modeler to give meaningful names to elements of the ontology or to relates elements in various ontology. In the latest release of Fluent Editor, we have introduced the possibility to add, remove and modify OWL annotations with full support for SKOS and DcTerms. As always this has been implemented thinking of the usability over everything. 

All actions related to the annotations are reachable from the Annotation tab that was added in the right column of the Fluent Editor window. To see how to use annotations in Fluent Editor,you can open the Book Reference template. To see the template, click on File -> New  and then Book Reference.

Collaborative ontology editing with the use of Fluent Editor and the Ontorion Server

In the latest release of Fluent Editor, we have implemented a simple and intuitive way for multiple users to edit the same ontology at the same time. This is possible by using the functionalities of both Fluent Editor and Cognitum's scalable knowledge management system Ontorion. In this article we will try to give you a general understanding of how this concurrent editing of ontologies is working.

As a comment we would like to stress that the component that we will show you has been implemented in C# using the Ontorion API (that is part of the Ontorion Server). If thus have access to the Ontorion API and Ontorion Server, you can implement all functionalities that you see in this article in your custom program. For more information about Ontorion Server and the Ontorion API you can contact us here.

First of all open Fluent Editor, click File, Open&Import , Ontorion Server and then Connect to Ontorion.

Reasoning about ontologies - fast vs. complete answers

In this article you will gain more intuition about: - how to query your ontology - the difference between reasoner and materialized graph - what is materialization mode OWL-DL and materialization mode OWL-RL+ - when you can use faster OWL RL+ reasoning mode safely You will see two example ontologies: - about books (using data types, cardinality restriction, data type restrictions) - about political preferences (SWRL rules, defining concepts by enumeration) You can reproduce the steps by downloading the ontologies: - my_books.encnl - political_parties.encnl and opening it with FluentEditor on your computer.

About reasoners and materialized graph

With recent FluentEditor releases the user has three tools to query the ontology:

• reasoner of choice (in this example Hermit reasoner is used)
• materialized graph (we can use either OWL-DL or OWL-RL+ materialization mode)
• SPARQL queries

Fluent Editor's Interoperability with Protégé

Protégé is a great tool for editing ontologies allowing deep insight into the structure of the OWL ontology. Fluent Editor allows user to focus on actual meaning of the ontology (taxonomy, vocabulary, rule set, etc) being edited.
From the R2 release, Fluent Editor enables you to view and build ontology with both applications synchronously, through which you can enjoy those great features of both applications at the same time. This is supported by two related functionalities. -  exporting ontology from one window to the other, or importing ontology from the opened window to your current window. In this post we will look through how you can utilize this feature.


Initial Settings
By default, this interoperability with Protégé is disabled. In order to enable it, first you need to edit settings of the Protégé plug-in on Tab > Options as shown below. Set "Yes" for enabling the plug-in and enter your Protégé path on the bottom.