Tutorial: Ontology Development

"What's up folks." Today we are going to create a movie ontology for a client of your Acme company.

Step 1: Setup Ontology Plug-in

Ontologies are encapsulated in OSGi bundles. In eclipse we develop them as equinox plug-ins. An ontology bundle is a package that contains the sources (graph/*.pgraph), a compiled graph file (graph.tg), and Java resource files (src/ and bin/).

Open a New Plug-in Project wizard:

• Open Plug-in Development Perspective
• Select File >> New >> Other
• Select Plug-in Development >> Plug-in Project

A New Plug-in Project wizard will open.

• Our organization is Acme Software ltd and from there is our plug-in name derived, com.acme.movie.ontology. Insert that as project name. Next >
• In the following page you should know that this plugin does not contribute to UI, does not need activator or isn't a rich client application. Next >
• Use template Plug-in with a Simantics Ontology. Next >
• Your company domain is com.acme.movie and ontology name Movie, and the inital version is 1.0. Finish

You have now a new project in Package Explorer. In it you will find META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, graph/Movie.pgraph, and graph.tg.

Step 2: Initialize Ontology

Open Movie.pgraph and start editing.

As you are using Layer0 concepts, it is a good idea to capture its namespace:

 L0 = <http://www.simantics.org/Layer0-1.0>

Your acme company has a namespace which is used. You are creating a new one so it must be stated.

 <http://com.acme> : L0.Library
     @L0.new

The ontology has a representing resource, an instance of L0.Ontology. Don't forget to add stub-compiler metadata L0.HasResourceClass.

 Movie = <http://com.acme/Movie-1.0> : L0.Ontology
     L0.HasResourceClass "com.acme.ontology.Movie"

Step 3: Export package

Now that you have some content, graph compiler has created a Resource class com.acme.ontology.Movie under src/ folder. When developing database code you can gain access to your ontology concepts using this class. In OSGi plugin environment, the access to other plugins' classes is denied by default. To share it you must export its Java package.

• Open META-INF/MANIFEST.MF >> Exported Packages / Add >> com.acme.ontology

Your MANIFEST.MF should look like this.

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Bundle-ManifestVersion: 2
Bundle-Name: Ontology
Bundle-SymbolicName: com.acme.movie.ontology
Bundle-Version: 1.0.0.qualifier
Bundle-Vendor: ACME
Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: JavaSE-1.6
Require-Bundle: org.simantics.layer0;bundle-version="1.0.0"
Export-Package: com.acme.ontology

Step 4: Write your movie Ontology

Congratulations You have now set-up an ontology.