Export > Export Ontology as OWL File

This feature can be used to export the current Ontology asset collection into a downloadable OWL file. The conversion process between SHACL and OWL includes all rules that are used by Export > Export Ontology as RDF Schema File, but also OWL-specific rules. This may be a good starting point when you need to interact with OWL-based tools that cannot properly handle SHACL, such as OWL reasoners.

Note

Even if they share many features including cardinality and type constraints, OWL and SHACL have some substantial semantic differences. In particular, OWL is based on the so-called Open-World-Assumption, which makes it difficult to express or validate certain constraints. For example, if a Person has two biological fathers, an OWL engine would not flag this as a mistake but instead infer that these two fathers must be the same Person. As a result, OWL is best used for certain types of inferences, while SHACL is best for closed-world use cases that are typically found in enterprise applications.

Caution

Like the RDF Schema conversion, the mapping to OWL is based on heuristics and is lossy, because not all SHACL features have an equivalent construct in OWL.

Tip

The exact SHACL rules that are used for the conversion can be found in the graph with URI http://datashapes.org/shacl2owl in the workspace.

See Also

• Export > Export Ontology as RDF Schema File

• Manage > Also create global OWL Properties

• Transform > Convert OWL Axioms to SHACL Constraints

Further Reading on SHACL

• Form Generation using SHACL and DASH (External Link)

• SHACL Advanced Features Specification (External Link)

• SHACL W3C Specification (External Link)

Further Reading on Ontologies

• Working with Ontologies

Further Reading on TopBraid

• Introduction to EDG