Introduction on ontologies

What is an ontology?

An ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. The representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members). The definitions of the representational primitives include information about their meaning and constraints on their logically consistent application. (Source: http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-definition-2007.htm)

An example: the City ontology

OSP-core ships with one simple example ontology, called city. You can use it to play around and get familiar with OSP-core. We will also use it a lot in this documentation as an example.

The city ontology provides the concepts to describe people and buildings in a city. In this graph we show the different entities in the ontology. We used Ontology2Dot for that:

To use the city ontology you have to install it using the tool Pico:

pico install city

Take a look at our examples to see how you can build your own city!