Using ontologies in Javascript apps

Ontologies are resources that describe concepts and how several classes and properties in a certain domain relate to each other. For example, if you’re creating a social network app, you might want to use the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology, which describes things like “Person” and “knows”. When creating linked data applications, you’re likely to work a lot with ontologies. Since ontologies, their classes and their properties all use URLs as identifiers, that means that you might write a lot of long strings. This is not only bothersome, but also a source of unnecessary typos and a possible performance bottleneck.

That’s why we created the @ontologies project. This is an open source repository that converts RDF ontologies into JS exports, pubslihed in NPM for easy re-use. If your IDE is smart enough, it will auto-import the ontologies and provide and useful tooltips with ontological descriptions for each item.

How to use it

## Add it to your project yarn add @ontologies/core @ontologies/schema

// Initialize it once (./init.js) import { setup } from "@ontologies/core" ; setup ();

// Use it import "./init" ; import { name } from "@ontologies/schema" ; document . getElementById ( "app" ). innerHTML = ` <h1>Schema URL: ${ name . value } </h1> ` ;

Check out a running example on CodeSandbox.

We’ve currently added ActivityStreams, DCElements, DCTerms, DCMIType, FOAF, OWL, PROV-O, RDF, RDFS, Schema, SHACL, SKOS and XSD.

PRs for new ontologies are welcome!