Documentation of ontology concepts

Widoco builds on top of LODE, an open source tool designed to generate a cross reference section with the definition of classes, properties, data properties and individuals of the ontology. Widoco extends LODE by extending the metadata types used in the annotation of ontology concepts.

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Dynamic visualization

Widoco uses WebVowl to create an interactive diagram to the documentation. The diagram can be used to filter and browse concepts and properties.

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Markdown support

You can write your class descriptions using markdown, and they will automatically render in your ontology documentation.

Ontology metadata documentation

Widoco processes and recognizes over forty properties for ontology metadata description from common vocabularies and standards. These terms have been collected in a best practices document grouping terms, including a rationale of their importance when describing a vocabulary, which may help users on deciding whether to include them or not.

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Change log

Widoco extends Bubastis, a software for capturing differences between classes in ontologies, adding which are the properties, data properties and annotations that have changed from version to version.

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Provenance

Widoco produces a separate page, linked to the main HTML of the documentation, with the the provenance of the documentation. The page is captured both in both a human readable and machine readable way, following the PROV-O standard

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Annotations for discovery

Widoco includes json-ld snippets on the main html document with a basic description of the metadata annotated according to Schema.org. These snippets are useful for search engines to find and explore the contents of the documentation automatically.

For an example, you may go to the following link and view the page source. Close to the beggining of the document you will see a JSON-LD snippet with the information of the page, annotated according to schema.org. This would be the information of the page as seen by a search engine.

Serialization and content negotiation

Widoco automatically creates an .htaccess file to access the documentation through its URI once it is published online. We have adopted the W3C best practices for vocabulary publishing on the Web, adapting the content negotiation to the vocabulary URI (hash versus slash vocabularies) and serving the ontology (by default) on RDF/XML, TTL and N3.

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Evaluation Reports

Widoco enables users to produce evaluation reports of the ontology, facilitating checking whether the ontology has any pitfalls in its design. Widoco produces these reports by using the OOPS! web service, which evaluates ontologies against a catalog of pitfalls.

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