Behaviors

Behaviors are a means to extend traditional ruby classes/objects with ontological information.

The “Ontology” Behavior

The ontology behavior uses a specified attribute of a class (default is name) as an ontology term. A query is made to find all the relationships of the ontology term contained within a triple store. These are accessed via the ontology method on an instance of a class.

Code Example

This example is based on some terms in the Radlex 2.0 ontology.

require 'active_sesame'
class OntologyTest
  attr_accessor :owl_term
  ActiveSesame::Behaviors::Ontology.mimic(self)
end

ot = OntologyTerm.new
ot.owl_term = "http://www.owl-ontologies.com/Ontology1241733063#RID3436"
ot.ontology #Builds a ActiveSesame::Ontology::Term for the value of owl_term
ot.ontology.relationships
ot.ontology.Preferred_Name.term #Looks up relationships and returns the Ontology::Term for its value
ot.ontology.Is_A
ot.ontology.Is_A.Preferred_Name
end