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Ontology concepts

Short glossary for engineers new to OWL/RDF who are evaluating Strixonomy.

Core terms

Term Meaning
IRI Internationalized Resource Identifier — the canonical ID for a class, property, or individual (e.g. http://example.org/people#Person)
Prefix Short name for a namespace in Turtle (@prefix ex: <http://example.org/people#> .) — lets you write ex:Person instead of the full IRI
Turtle (.ttl) Human-readable RDF syntax; primary editable format (byte-stable span write-back). OBO, RDF/XML, and OWL/XML also support write-back — see Supported formats
Class A category or type (e.g. Person, Organization)
Object property A relationship between individuals (e.g. hasParent)
Data property A relationship from an individual to a literal value (e.g. hasAge)
Individual A named instance of one or more classes
Axiom A logical statement, such as SubClassOf or EquivalentClasses
Annotation Descriptive metadata (labels, comments) that does not affect reasoning

Minimal Turtle example

@prefix ex: <http://example.org/people#> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

<http://example.org/people> a owl:Ontology .

ex:Person a owl:Class ;
    rdfs:label "Person" ;
    rdfs:subClassOf ex:Thing .

ex:Thing a owl:Class ;
    rdfs:label "Thing" .
  • ex:Person is a class with label "Person" and parent ex:Thing
  • rdfs:subClassOf is a simple axiom (Person is a subclass of Thing)
  • Strixonomy indexes this file and shows Person under Classes in the explorer

Download this pattern from fixtures/example.ttl or the first success tutorial.

Manchester syntax

Strixonomy supports subclass, equivalent, and disjoint axioms via the Manchester editor — see Manchester editor.

Reasoning profiles

Profile Typical use
EL OWL EL ontologies (default in Strixonomy)
RL OWL RL materialization
RDFS RDFS entailment
DL Full OWL 2 DL via OntoLogos 1.0 (dl profile)

Asserted vs inferred hierarchy

  • Asserted — parent/child edges written explicitly in your .ttl files
  • Inferred — additional subsumption edges computed by the reasoner
  • Combined — asserted plus inferred edges in the explorer tree

Run Strixonomy: Run Reasoner before switching to inferred or combined mode.

Strixonomy vs Strixonomy

  • Strixonomy — VS Code IDE (UI)
  • Strixonomy — Rust semantic workspace engine (CLI, LSP, strixonomy / strixonomy-* crates)

Next steps