Managing Ontologies

Custom root-class

By default, the root class of the Class Hierarchy is set to Thing. You can set it to another class via Manage > Root Class of Hierarchy. This might be desired, for example, if your ontology specializes another ontology, and you don’t want to show the ancestor classes of your main custom class. Replace the default class-name “Thing” with the name of the preferred root class. Autocomplete assists in entering the class-name.

Global OWL Properties

If Also Create Global OWL Properties option is activated, then creating a new SHACL property shape will also produce an owl:DatatypeProperty or owl:ObjectProperty. In other words, a property participating in a shape will be given a type.

Declare a global property for each new SHACL property shape.

By default, this option is de-activated. Activating it will result in a situation where you delete property shapes, but a property declaration remains and will need to be manually deleted separately.

Allow Editing Instances

With this option activated, users may edit all fields of all instances directly in the Ontology’s forms. Usually only labels and comments will be editable in the form.

Turning on this option may significantly slow down the system after each edit. The best practice remains to keep instances and classes/shapes separate. Use this option only if you plan to have a small number of instances and information about them will change relatively rarely.

Allow filtering Class Hierarchy to locally defined classes

If activated then the Class Hierarchy will have a setting to Display locally defined classes only and their superclasses. This should only be activated for small to medium numbers of classes due to performance reasons. Once activated, the Class Hierarchy panel has a button to show the locally defined classes only. Here, “locally defined” includes all classes that have any locally defined class as subclass and any (imported) class that has any local subclass at any depth. The quick search box remains locally defined only.

Other Management Operations

See Working with Asset Collections for information on other Manage operations.