Tooling for ontology development and documentation

[jokroese]

It turns out @valevo is old school and writes directly in HTML. This is fine for now (and quite funny for me).

However, this isn't ideal for maintenance longer term.

I'm wondering what tooling is available for developing, documenting and maintaining ontologies. This is a new area to me so we will need some research.

[jokroese]

From some initial research I've found:

• We should probably define the ontology in Turtle for its readability (human-friendly and concise), ease of use, and wide support.
• Protégé, an ontology editor with a graphical interface: https://protege.stanford.edu/. This seems to be a pretty standard tool for ontology development
• WebVOWL, app for visualising ontologies: https://github.com/VisualDataWeb/WebVOWL. Less widespread, not actively maintained but does a nice job for the focus on communicating the ontology to a non-technical audience which we've spoken about as important. There may be alternatives to this.

[jokroese]

After that, I found this Awesome List for ontology resources: https://github.com/ozekik/awesome-ontology as well as this list focused on ontology resources for digital humanities: https://github.com/CLARIAH/awesome-humanities-ontologies. This section of Awesome Semantic Web is also useful as a more selective list: https://github.com/semantalytics/awesome-semantic-web?tab=readme-ov-file#ontology-development.

[jokroese]

I was also thinking about (and haven't yet seen) nice, flexible ways to take an ontology as input and create customisable documentation websites. I'm particularly interested in this as we are set on making sure that this ontology can be easily communicated.

Some documentation tools exist (Wideco, Oontology, LODE) but they all look pretty formal and plain and, at first glance, non-customisable. I want graphs and colours and to get Radical Data-y with it!

I don't think it would be too hard to build a better alternative from scratch. One workflow could be: Turtle file defining the ontology -> convert to JSON-LD -> read as data in a framework like Astro.

There are also tools that turn a .ttl file into an API (e.g. OBA). We could do this and use it for building the website. This is an extra step but maybe having an open API could be useful for something else?

If we decide to build an alternative, we should create a template version so that others can point it to their ontology and get a nice customisable website out of it.