Imports and namespace mgmnt

[Hans Overbeek]

Hi all,

We are using VB3 v8.0.1 to maintain several ontologies en thesauri. I have some difficulty to figure out how VB handles imports and imported resources.

We have several comparable SKOS projects for thesauri and comparable OWL projects for registers (of different types of organizations). All these projects use one main ontology en one core thesaurus. We thought we could load the main ontology and the core thesaurus to the Ontology Mirror and import them to the other projects.

I tried to configure all other projects in the same manner, but there are still differences in greyed out/black namespaces and also import-trees look different. It feels like some of this information stays cached and can not be changed by clearing and reloading the project data, nor by re-importing the main ontology and core thesaurus.

What is the impact of an import of a new version of a graph to the ontology mirror? I presumed that a new version would be the only version in the mirror and used by all the projects to reflect the changes. But I didn't manage to 'upgrade' existing projects to new versions of our main ontology or core thesaurus.

We didn't find documentation which elaborates more on this than the manual[1]. Is there any documentation that goes into more detail, or is there someone willing to give a quick 101 on namespaces and imports? I have the feeling that there are just some tiny, but apparently important, details that we overlooked, or assumptions we made, which are not completely correct.

[1] http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/doc/user/namespaces_imports.jsf#namespace_management

Hans Overbeek

[Armando Stellato]

Dear Hans,

 

I see two points here:

 

• Inconsistency of configuration across different projects that have been supposedly configured the same. The best way is to recreate the error. If you could recreate a small example: even just two projects, what they are, the data they have – even just the import list – and what exactly u see different, they we can do the same
• About the mirror: once in the past (but reaaaaally in the past of the backing platform Semantic Turkey, even before VB3) it worked the way you thought it did, that is, if I got it correctly : if an ontology A imports a certain ontology B, and the URI of B is present in the mirror, then each time A is opened, ST would have checked its list of imports and, finding the imported B in the mirror, would have compared the time stamp of the mirrored B with the import datetime of B in A. If the mirror is more recent, it would have updated B (in A) with the one in the mirror. However, we later on preferred to avoid this approach, not because it was difficult to realize (we already implemented it) rather because it forced unwanted changes in other ontologies (maybe one wanted to have a previous version of an ontology, or a fork, a development version, whatever, imported in one another). So far, for us a mirror is just a cache of an ontology. So, back to our example, if you want to update B in A, you must export B from its associated project B and then in project A you must first remove the import and then redo it again. One improvement I already planned for the future is:
• To have the mirror being considered not just of a map of URIs and data, rather have different identifiers. The uri should be still usable for retrieval, but a single URI could have more files to represent it.
• To allow, which I suppose is very much in your idea, to directly update imports by using not the mirror, but directly the reference to another project. So if you are working on evolving two ontologies A and B and A imports B, then whenever you update the content of B, you should be able to quickly update the imported graph of B in A by getting the data from B without repeating any export/import to/from file.

 

Cheers,

 

Armando

 

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