There was a lot of interest at the time, @anon36056958, I see. It is a hard problem to tackle.
On the one hand I would like to have central entrypoints to dig down into what is available, but on the other hand I don’t like centralized initiatives (in the related topic CDN like Cloudflare are mentioned, but these are (becoming) monopolists and/or trackers). There is @tuelsch experiment with search in WhatTheOntology as an option, and mention of decentralized approaches.
Tangential…
I am interested in terminusdb.com and they support OWL to define database schema’s, which are saved as RDF, can be edited as turtle and queried as JSON-LD.
They recognize the problems of OWL (which led to its failure in adoption) in Graph Fundamentals Part 3: Graph Schema Languages:
What really killed OWL was the impracticality and idealism of the academics. They wanted a language that was capable of usefully describing an ‘open world’
[…]
Open world reasoning such as this is a very interesting and commendable — and sometimes highly useful — field. However, if I have a RDF graph of my own and I want to control and reason about its contents and structure in isolation from whatever else is out there, this is a decidedly closed world problem. It turns out that it is essentially impossible to do this through open world reasoning. If my database refers to a record that does not exist in my database (i.e a breach of referential integrity) then it does not matter whatever else exists in the world, that reference is wrong and I want to know about it. I most especially do not want my reasoning engine to decide that this record could exist somewhere else in the world — if it is not in my database it does not exist and I know this. If I cannot manage my own database and make sure that it is not full of errors, then it does not matter what else exists in the world because my house is built on a pile of mud. I can’t even control what’s in my own bloody database that I control entirely, who am I kidding that I can start reasoning about the universe beyond.
They are not just bashing the efforts that went into all the standardization activity, but take a more down-to-earth approach:
Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that, hidden in all the nonsense, there are some exceptionally good ideas — triples, URL identifiers and OWL itself are all tremendously good ideas in essence and nothing else out there comes close.
From @luke on terminus forum:
For schema design, TerminusDB uses the OWL language with two modifications to make it suitable as a schema language. Namely, we dispense with the open world interpretation and insist on the unique name assumption. This provides us with a rich modelling language which can provide constraints on the allowable shapes in the graph. We really support OWL as it is logically expressive.
So if I adopt TerminusDB I’ll be using Protege (probably) and create my own OWL schema’s as the basis for application data models, and it is at this level I would be interested to see what others are using / what are standard constructs.
In that regard VOWL as mentioned by @pheyvaer looks interesting as a way to visualize, and the (javascript) projects are still maintained (though visualdataweb.org itself isn’t). I like the clarity of the visualization, instead of things that look like this.
