Is Ontowiki the right tool for what I have in mind?

[Frans Knibbe]

Hello!

I am in a situation where I am considering giving people read/write access to a Virtuoso triple store. These people are no data experts and are not familiar with RDF. I am looking for a low-threshold way of enabling people to make small data edits. They could edit their own profile data for example. Other data could come from other sources (automated database imports) and be read-only. 

A web search showed that there are not many RDF data editors available, but based on descriptions I think Ontowiki could fit the bill. There some things that are not clear to me yet, so I hope someone could help me to find out if Ontowiki really is the thing I am looking for. I have come up with some questions that I think are relevant to what I have in mind:

• Is using Ontowiki as a data editor a valid use case?
  
• Does ontowiki use SPARQL to interact with the triple store?
  
• Does the use of ontowiki in any way prohibit updating data by other means?
  
• Does Ontowiki respect Virtuoso's authentication mechanisms and graph level security?

Of course I would welcome any other information too.

Thanks in advance!

Frans Knibbe

[Sebastian Tramp]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 01:48:50AM -0700, Frans Knibbe wrote:

Hi Frans,

> - Is using Ontowiki as a data editor a valid use case?

this is THE use-case for Ontowiki.

> - Does ontowiki use SPARQL to interact with the triple store?

yes, but it uses SPARQL over ODBC and SPARQL is not the only query
language. SQL is used too (Query Cache, Versioning support)

> - Does the use of ontowiki in any way prohibit updating data by other
> means?

if you disable the query cache (and versioning), you can update your
graph directly and OW will show you your changes instantly.

The typical use-case is to enable both features and update the store
over OntoWikis own SPARQL endpoint (which is a proxy endpoint)

> - Does Ontowiki respect Virtuoso's authentication mechanisms and graph
> level security?

no, OW typically uses the dba user to interact with virtuoso. OW
implements its own authentication and authorization mechanisms and
provides its own endpoint as well as other interfaces (JSON/RPC) which
honour the ACLs.

In which context you want to deploy OW? how much user / request do you
expect and how many triples you want to manage?

Best regards

Sebastian Tramp

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[Frans Knibbe]

Hello Sebastian,

Thank you for those clear answers. To answer your question, I am thinking about a situation where organisational data are published as Linked Data on an intranet. The main reason for applying the Linked Data concept would be preventing fragmentation of data sources. Data could come from different sources and different systems: a distributed system. Some data might come from legacy systems that have their own methods of data editing, but when new data sets are created it would be nice to be able to use an editor for Linked Data off the shelf.

Some datasets might be small and simple enough to allow any user to edit them. I think that some constraints should be in place to make that manageable. A good example would be to allow users to update their personal profile data. In that case, the subject of all triples would be the same and the predicate could come from a limited set of vocabularies (foaf, vcard, ...). By imposing such limits it might be easier for users that do not know about RDF to interact with data.

Looking at you answers, the way versioning is handled could be problematic. Let's say data stores use some native way of versioning, by using the PROV vocabulary for instance ... Could Ontowiki work with that?

Greetings,

Frans

Op dinsdag 14 oktober 2014 08:24:41 UTC+2 schreef Sebastian Tramp:

[Sebastian Tramp]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 06:52:48AM -0700, Frans Knibbe wrote:

> Looking at you answers, the way versioning is handled could be problematic.
> Let's say data stores use some native way of versioning, by using the PROV
> vocabulary for instance ... Could Ontowiki work with that?

In that case, you should disable OWs versioning feature at all but you will not
have a versioning tab then and you will not be able to do rollbacks within OW.

In case the prov data is written to the same graph you will see the triples at
least.