RDF API for PHP

Using RAP's Ontology-Centric OntModel API

This turorial is part of the RAP - Rdf API for PHP documentation.

Daniel Westphal, Chris Bizer
October 2004

This tutorial is based on the Jena Ontology API tutorial.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Running example: the camera ontology
3. Creating ontology models
4. The generic ontology type: OntResource
5. Handling ontology components: basic class expressions
6. Handling ontology components: properties
7. Instances (individuals)

Introduction

This tutorial describes RAP's ontology API, and covers a range of common tasks. Not all details of the API are covered here: Please refer to the RAP PHPDoc to get the full details of the capabilities of the API.

The ontology model is an extended version of RAP's ResModel API. OntModel extends ResModel by adding direct support for the kinds of objects expected to be in an ontology: classes (in a class hierarchy), properties (in a property hierarchy) and individuals. The properties defined in the ontology language map to accessor methods. For example, an OntClass has a method to list its super-classes, which corresponds to the values of the subClassOf property. This point is worth emphasizing: no information is stored in the OntClass object itself. When the OntClass listSuperClasses() method is called, the information is retrieved from the underlying RDF model. Similarly adding a subclass to an OntClass asserts an additional RDF statement into the model.

OntModel just provides a more convenient API for working with ontology models, but doesn't do any inference by itself. If you also need inference you have to combine OntModel with an underlying InfModelF or InfModelB. If you don't need inference you can combine OntModel with an underlying MemModel or DbModel.

Running example: the camera ontology

To illustrate the principles of using the Ontology API, we use examples drawn from a Roger Costello's camera ontology. The camera ontology contains a set of classes describing some aspects of the domain of still-picture cameras, as shown below:

We will only use some of the elements from this ontology to illustrate the ontology API throughout this tutorial.

Creating Ontology Models

RAP's OntModel is an extension of RAP's ResModel that provides extra capabilities for handling ontology data sources. Ontology models are created through the RAP ModelFactory. The simplest way to create an ontology model is as follows:

It uses RDFS as the ontology language and assumes that all of the ontology data will be stored in-memory (MemModel). Actually only RDFS vocabulary is supported. An OWL vocabulary will be implemented in the near future

Note: it is the choice of reasoner, not the choice of language profile that determines if entailed statements are seen through the ontology API. The following example creates an ontology model with RDFS entailment in backward-chaining mode:

The Generic Ontology Type: OntResource

All of the classes in the ontology API that represent ontology values have OntResource as a common super-class. This makes OntResource a good place to put shared functionality for all such classes, and makes a handy common return value for general methods. The OntResource extends the ResResource class, so any general method that accepts a resource or an RDFNode will also accept an OntResource, and consequently, any other ontology value.

Some of the common attributes of ontology resources that are expressed through methods on OntResource are shown below:

For each of these properties, there is a standard pattern of available methods:

Example: addSameAs( $ResResource ), or isSameAs( $ResResource ).

For full details of the individual methods, please consult the PHPDoc.

OntResource defines some other general utility methods. To get or set the value of a given property, use addPropertyValue( $property, $value ) or getPropertyValue( $property ). Similarly the values of a named property can be listed or removed.

Finally, OntResource provides methods for listing, getting and setting the RDF types of a resource. The rdf:type property is one for which many entailment rules are defined in the semantic models of the various ontology languages. Therefore, the values that listRDFTypes() returns is more than usually dependent on the actual reasoner bound to the ontology model. For example, suppose we have class A, class B which is a subclass of A, and resource x whose asserted rdf:type is B. With no reasoner, listing x's RDF types will return only B. If the reasoner is able to calculate the closure of the subclass hierarchy (InfModelF and InfmodelB can), X's RDF types would also include A.

For some tasks, getting a complete list of the RDF types of a resource is exactly what is needed. For other tasks, this is not the case. An ontology editor, for example, might want to distinguish in its display between inferred and asserted types. In the above example, only x rdf:type B is asserted, everything else is inferred. One way to make this distinction is to make use of the base model. Getting the x resource from the base model and listing the type properties there would return only the asserted values.

To list the RDF types of a resource, use:

Related methods allow the rdf:type to be tested, set and returned.

Handling Ontology Components: Basic Class Expressions

Classes are the basic building blocks of an ontology. A simple class is represented in RAP by an OntClass object. You can get an OntClass by calling getOntClass() on the ontology model:

Once we have the ontology class object, we can begin processing it through the methods defined on OntClass. The attributes of a class are handled in a similar way to the attributes of OntResource, above, with a collection of methods to set, add, get, test, list and remove values. Class properties that are handled in this way are:

Thus, in our example ontology, we can print a list the subclasses of Camera as follows:

OntClass has some other commonly used utilities. To show all of the instances that mention this class as their rdf:type (or one of them), use listInstances().

Handling Ontology Components: Properties

OntProperty is an extension of OntResource and allows access to the additional information that can be asserted about properties in an ontology language Again, using the pattern of add, set, get, list, has, and remove methods, we can access the following attributes of an OntProperty:

In the example camera ontology, the property body is a sub-property of part, and has domain Camera and range Body (that is, it maps from instances of cameras to instances of camera bodies). We can reconstruct this definition in an empty ontology model as follows:

Instances (Individuals)

RAP supports a simple notion of an Individual, which is essentially an alias for ResResource.

In the above example, the individual is named, but this is not necessary. The method call createInstance() creates an anonymous individual belonging to the given class.