Creating a new ontology project

The fast way to create a new ontology project

To begin using OntoPilot, you will need to create a new, "empty" ontology project. Although you could do this from scratch, it is much easier to let OntoPilot do the work for you.

First, create an empty folder for your new ontology project. It can be located anywhere on your computer's file system.

Then, from within the new folder, run ontopilot with the init command, and give it the name you'd like to use for your project's ontology file. For example, if your ontology will be called demo.owl, the commands to run would look something like this.

$ mkdir demo
$ cd demo
$ ontopilot init demo.owl

When you run the init command, OntoPilot turns the current directory into a complete ontology project that includes a project configuration file, a base ontology file, and source files for imports and ontology entities.

The parts of an ontology project

Let's take a closer look at the contents of an ontology project. Assuming you followed the example commands in the previous section, the contents of the demo project folder will look like this.

demo/
├── imports/
├── ontology/
├── project.conf
└── src/
    ├── demo-base.owl
    ├── entities/
    │   ├── demo_classes.csv
    │   ├── demo_individuals.csv
    │   └── demo_properties.csv
    └── imports/
        ├── bfo_demo_terms.csv
        └── imported_ontologies.csv

The src folder contains all of the source files for building your import modules and ontology files, and the folders imports and ontology are where import modules and ontology files will go when you have OntoPilot build them. These topics are covered in Managing imports and Building an ontology and will not be discussed further here.

The file project.conf provides all of the information that OntoPilot needs to compile your project's import modules, build your project's ontology files, and generate release versions of your ontology. If you open this configuration file in your favorite text editor (e.g., vim, emacs, notepad, etc.), you will see that it includes a large number of configurable settings and extensive documentation for each setting. These settings allows you to customize many aspects of an ontology project, but for most projects, the default values for nearly all settings will be just fine.

Although you do not need to change anything in the default configuration file to get started, you will eventually probably want to customize at least a few of the settings for your project. In particular, dev_base_IRI and release_base_IRI allow you to specify custom IRI schemes for identifying your ontology documents, and entity_sourcefiles lets you customize which source files will be compiled into the final ontology.

For now, though, we won't worry about changing any of these settings. You are now ready to begin developing your ontology.