In the Ontology Manager AMA last September, tmiskow asked Florian whether he
wanted compatibility with a specific framework, or just a documented and
consistent import and export format. Florian answered that most exchanged
ontologies use RDF, in XML or Turtle. The AMA closed without an answer to that
one, and chrisl invited follow-up posts tagged ontology-management, so here it is.
We built a converter from the Ontology Manager JSON export into OWL 2 and SHACL.
We took the type system from the published foundry-platform-python SDK rather than
from the documentation, so it stays honest when the SDK changes. Of the 22 types
in the ObjectPropertyType union, 11 map directly to XSD and 7 have no counterpart
in any published standard. The code is public:
https://github.com/fabio-rovai/open-ontologies/tree/main/case-studies/foundry-owl-crosswalk
Two questions I could not answer from the docs.
-
Is there a native RDF or OWL export that is not documented? The white paper
Enabling Interoperability and Preventing Lock-In with Foundry says Foundry offers
the ability to import and export in multiple open formats including RDF XML/TTL
and OWL natively. The Ontology Manager export and import page describes a JSON
format, and notes you should not depend on the exported JSON schema as it may
change over time. If a supported path exists, we would rather use it than our own
converter. -
We recover owl:inverseOf by pairing the two link sides that share a
linkTypeRid. That is the gap Florian raised in the AMA. Is a shared linkTypeRid
across both sides guaranteed in production, or is that an artefact of the OSDK
test fixtures?
Happy to share what we found either way.