Re: [OWLAPI-developer] building an application which uses OWL ontologies in web forms

[Matthew H. <mat...@cs...>]

Hi,

> Hello everyone,
>
> First very sorry for cross-posting for those also on the Protégé OWL  
> list, being a newbie I am really not sure what is the best target  
> for my questions.
>
> I just joined the list and am very new to OWL and the OWL API.
>
> I am developing a Java EE web application where I would like to use  
> various parts of OBO Foundry ontologies (which come in OWL files) to  
> populate some of my application web form components (drop-down  
> menus, multiple select menus, hierarchical tree menus).  I have  
> tried today to search in the archives and on the web on how to get  
> started with this task but I am having trouble finding answers to  
> what I am a sure is not a new issue J
>
> Any advice on how to go about this would be very helpful.  Some  
> questions I have for example are:
> ·         Is the OWL API the thing to use for doing this?

I don't see why not.  OWLSight is built on top of the OWL API.

> ·         Do I store and access these ontologies in a database or  
> can my web application simply access the various OWL files during  
> runtime?

You could just load these into memory during runtime.

> ·         If I should store them in a database does there already  
> exist a set of Java EE JPA annotated or Hibernate annotated entity  
> classes representing the OWL object model?  Or does the database  
> schema need to be built a different way (no using an ORM)?

I'm not sure why you would want to store these ontologies in a  
database.  If you want to do this then there isn't any implementation  
of the OWL API that can do this, so you would have to use something  
else.

Cheers,

Matthew