The People_Example Ontology

I'm working on an article where I provide an overview of the various semantic web technologies such as OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, and SHACL. As part of the article I'm including a sample ontology to illustrate various concepts such as defined classes, the Open World Assumption, and SWRL rules. This post is so that readers can download this example ontology. To download click on this link: People_Ontology That should take you to Google drive where you will get a message: "No Preview Available". Click on the blue button: "Download" and then put the OWL file wherever you wish to store your ontologies.

Also, in order to load and view the ontology in Protégé, I've provided instructions for people who have never used Protégé to load the required plugins and views as well as instructions for viewing examples in the ontology: Using the People_Ontology.

This is not a substitute for the Pizza Tutorial. This is a simpler ontology and the documentation is mostly about viewing examples rather than on developing the ontology. For an in-depth, hands-on tutorial please see the previous post on the revised Pizza Tutorial. This is primarily meant for readers of the article and for those who want to view some capabilities of OWL and Protégé but don't want to go through a tutorial. Sort of an executive summary tutorial. However, there are some examples in this ontology, especially regarding property hierarchies and SPARQL that may be interesting to those who have done the Pizza tutorial. One of the most important additions is a sophisticated SPARQL query that illustrates the concept of linked data developed with the help of Franz Inc.

Note: I've received some feedback about the binary definition of gender in this ontology. This was not meant to be any type of political statement. While I don't write about political issues I want to emphasize I completely support LGBTQ rights. The binary definition of gender was nothing but a simplifying assumption to create what I hoped would be an intuitive example that was easily understood by everyone. For the time being I'm leaving it as is because I'm not sure the appropriate way to change some of the defined classes with non-binary definitions of gender but I want to emphasize that just as the Pizza ontology isn't meant to really model a restaurant, this model is just an example for learning purposes with many simplifying assumptions. Just as I didn't deal with adopted children or step parents I simplified things by having a binary definition of gender and I realize that wouldn't be appropriate for a real world ontology.