David R Newman

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How to Write Good OWL Ontologies

In my experience of reviewing other ontologies, reading papers on OWL and writing my own ontologies, I have found some good design practices and some really quite bad ones. Therefore, in this blog I intend to set out good design practices for OWL ontologies and why I believe these to be better than some of the practices that I have found.

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28/09/2006 Defining XML Entities for your Namespaces

If you are writing an OWL ontology by hand in RDF/XML, there is many occurences where you will need to write out the whole URI for a namespace, after every rdf:about and rdf:resource for a start. By using XML entities to represent a namespace not only is it quicker to type up the ontology, it means you only have to change the URI in the entity definition to change the namespace throughout the whole ontology. A further benefit is that you are less likely to make typos when typing the URIs. My MusicBrainz Ontology uses XML entities and clearly shows how much time using XML entities can save.

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Page written by David R Newman (drn[at]ecs.soton.ac.uk). Last updated June 27 2018 14:44:18.