Hi Daniel,
Piggy Bank and Solvent (and for that matter, Semantic Bank and the
unreleased Longwell 2.0) adopt the philosophy of not requiring any
ontology. These pieces of software will try to do their best with just
the data, so that users can wander the Web, scrape whatever data they
want without having to worry about installing the right ontologies. And
RDF, by its design, lets us deal with data even in the absence of
ontology. (For traditional databases, you need to set up tables and
schemas and all that before you can get to play with your data and have
fun.) It is this virtue of RDF that, I think, will make database
technologies more accessible and user-friendly to end users, and more
socially scalable. Stefano has a blog post on this:
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/93/
In any case, no, you do not have to import ontologies into Piggy Bank
(even though you can do that just by browsing Firefox+Piggy Bank to
those ontologies and "collect" them). As for Solvent, there is no
feature to import ontologies. Your scraper script can just use the
ontologies you need (by adding RDF statements having URIs specified by
those ontologies).
Cheers,
David
Daniel S. Haischt wrote:
>Hello,
>
>for some reason I was not able to find an answer to the
>following question(s) in the list archive ...
>
> * I already have an OWL ontology, that I want to use
> to create a Scraper using Solvent. How can I import
> an already existing (OWL) ontology into Solvent?
>
> * Do I have to 'import' the existing ontology into
> piggy bank?
>
> * If yes how do I select the just imported ontology
> within Solvent? For example if I choose the FOAF
> ontology, will this cause the name context menu
> (item's URI, item's title etc.) to change its
> contents according to the selected ontology?
>
>
>
Received on Mon Jan 09 2006 - 14:07:31 EST