Populating RDFS Ontology from RDF data

2
votes

I am new to the ontology field. My question is a clarification one rather than a problem. The information that am dealing with is written in RDF format. I built my own RDFS ontology and I want to populate that ontology from the RDF data that I have. How can I do that with Jena ?? Does the naming of resources/properties need to be the same between RDF data and my RDFS ontology ?? Example is appreciated.

Also, the difference between RDF and RDFS is still not so clear to me. Can I consider RDF as an ontology but with limited capabilities (in encoding the knowledge) ??

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rdfontologyrdfs
Related questions: stackoverflow.com/questions/575979/… and stackoverflow.com/questions/9755113/… – Ben Companjen

1 Answers

3
votes

The RDFS triples define the meaning of the vocabulary of properties and classes (through subClassOf and subPropertyOf triples), while the RDF triples are just the data over which the RDFS metadata is applied.

Example, my metadata (RDFS) is 

:Dog rdfs:subClassOf :Mammal

(which should be read as "Dogs are a sub set of Mammals or every Dog is also a Mammal"

and the data (RDF) 

:Fido rdf:type :Dog
:Spike rdf:type :Dog

(should be read as Fido and Spike are elements of the set called "Dog")

The RDFS metadata defines your vocabulary of Classes and Properties, the data refers to those classes of properties.

A very nice reading about all data is in the "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist", not to theoretical and it does cover things in a comprehensive way.