How to create an ontology in Java?

Question

I've some data triplets that I want to write in some sort of basic OWL ontology. I've triplets like:

Delhi is part of India 

or

India is an Asian country

Note that I've relations like "is-a", "part-of", or "related-to". What's the simplest way to build an ontology? Any working example or a reference to an example website will be great help!

Answer 1

There are a lot of different things mixed up in your question, I strongly suggest you take a bit of time (away from the keyboard!) to think through what you're trying to achieve here.

Firstly, geographic ontologies can get quite complex, and a lot of work has already been done in this area. Probably the obvious starting point is the GeoNames ontology, which gives names to geographic features, including cities like Dehli and countries like India. At the very least you should re-use those names for the places in your application, as that will maximise the chances that your data can be successfully joined with other available linked-data sources.

However, you probably don't want the whole of GeoNames in your application (I'm guessing), so you also need to be clear why you need an ontology at all. A good way to approach this is from the outside of your application: rather than worry about which kind of Jena model to use, start by thinking through ways to complete the sentence "using the ontology, a user of my application will be able to ...". That should then lead you on to establishing some competency questions (see, for example, section 3 of this guide) for your ontology. Once you know what kinds of information you want to represent, and what kinds of queries you need to apply to it, your technology choices will be much clearer. I realise that these applications are typically developed iteratively, and you'll want to try some code out fairly early on, but I still advocate getting your destination more clearly in mind before you start your coding journey.

You imply that you want to use Jena to drive a web site. There are many choices here. Don't be mislead by the term semantic web - this actually means bringing web-like qualities to interlined data sets, rather than putting semantics into human readable web pages per se. While you can do so, and many people do, you'll need some additional layers in your architecture. We typically use one of two approaches: using Jena with a templating engine, such as Velocity, in a servlets container, or using a Ruby web framework and driving Jena via JRuby. There are many other ways to solve this particular problem: Jena doesn't address web publishing directly, but it can be used within any Java-based web framework.

Finally, regarding namespaces, you should really re-use existing vocabularies, and hence namespaces, where possible. Don't make up new names for things which already have representations on the web of data somewhere. Use GeoNames, or DbPedia, or any of the many other published vocabularies where they fit. If they don't fit, then you should create a new name rather than use an existing name in a non-compatible way. In this case, you should use the web domain of your application (e.g. your company or university) as the basis for the namespace. Ideally, you should publish your ontology at the base URL of the namespace, but this can sometimes be hard to arrange depending on local web policies.