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[higgins-dev] RE: Identity Schemas: Sample generated LDAP ontology

Sure Drummond, I've tried a couple so far, one free, one on a free trial.  The free one was developed at Stanford University and is called Protégé, available at http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/.  Protégé has seemed a bit picky as I've used it in the past but I think my earliest most picky issues have been resolved by how I'm now generating my output.  At any rate, I loaded the OWL I sent out into it and, while it gives an error while loading it, it still shows the class and property structure properly.  The error may be the OWL-DL issue described below.

The other one I've tried is from Altova and is called SemanticWorks, available at http://www.altova.com/products/semanticworks/semantic_web_rdf_owl_editor.html.  It seems a bit more robust than Protégé and has a nice graphical renderer but, ultimately, cost $ to license.  Altova's default validation level is OWL-Full and you can see the inconsistencies described below by choosing OWL-DL validation.  However, the graphical renderer works regardless of the validation level.

One or both of these tools I believe also have an eclipse plugin also but I haven't tried them yet.

I also neglected to mention in my first e-mail that our goal is to be OWL-DL.  As it turns out, the file I sent out is NOT OWL-DL, it is only OWL-Full.  However, the only reason it is not OWL-DL, is that the LDAP server at openldap.org has inconsistent schema.  It's mostly attribute definitions that are referenced in class definitions but not actually defined in the attribute definitions container.  At any rate, I sent the complete list of inconsistencies to Kurt Zeilenga to see if he wanted to correct that ... haven't received a response yet.  I'll generate some more examples from different servers and send them out including some from Novell eDirectory servers where the schema is not only required to be consistent, it's also actually enforced!  ;)

-Tom

>>> "Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 10/6/2006 5:28 PM >>>
Tom,

I hate to say it, but I don't have a viewer for an .owl file. Do you know of
one that's handy?

=Drummond 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Doman [mailto:TDoman@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 3:28 PM
To: 'Joaquin Miller'; 'Drummond Reed'; 'Daniel Perry'; 'Keith Hazelton';
'Mark Wahl'; 'Iain Henderson'; 'Johannes Ernst'; 'Peter Davis'; Duane Buss;
Dale Olds; Jim Sermersheim; Pat Felsted; 'Mary Ruddy'; Paul Trevithick;
'Dick Hardt'; 'RL 'Bob' Morgan'
Cc: higgins-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx; bandit-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Subject: Identity Schemas: Sample generated LDAP ontology

All,

I wanted to go ahead and get the LDAP schema discussion rolling.  Within the
Higgins and Bandit projects we've been looking at ways to abstract a variety
of identity repositories.  One of the most important for us at Novell is
LDAP repositories.  So, within the Higgins framework, we have created an
LDAP "Context Provider" (CP) which implements a method that generates a
Higgins OWL ontology from whatever LDAP repository is specified in the
configuration of the CP.

For your perusal, I have attached the output generated from pointing our
Higgins CP at the LDAP server running at ldap://openldap.org.  This ontology
is based upon the Higgins base ontology that Paul Trevithick mentioned at
http://identityschemas.org/ in item #2 under "Implementation".  Note that
the ontology generated is only an attempt to represent the schema defined on
the LDAP server specified.  It is NOT an attempt to fully represent the
schema defined by any particular RFC, vendor, etc.

Any questions, comments, feedback, or general collaboration on this work
would be appreciated.  Note that there are a variety of issues and todos
that we are currently discussing relating to this work, these can be found
at: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/LDAP_Issues_and_To-Dos.

Thanks,
Tom Doman
Novell Inc.





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