OWL Authoring Specification (v1.0)¶

Status: Historical / target UX for remaining v1.0 polish. Do not implement from this page as if authoring were still an MVP.

Shipped today: complete OWL 2 authoring (PAR-OWL-001, v0.22+), Turtle/OBO/RDF/XML/OWL/XML write-back, Manchester editor, Entity Inspector — see What ships today, authoring.md, and Supported formats.

This document remains useful for target UX gaps vs Protégé. Depends on ADR-0013, ADR-0006, and DEPENDENCY_MATRIX.md.

1. Purpose¶

Specify hybrid authoring for Protégé-competitive v1.0:

• Quick forms for common axioms and annotations
• Manchester OWL Syntax editor for complex class expressions
• Text buffer with LSP assist for power users

2. Authoring surfaces¶

3. P0 axiom types (v1.0)¶

4. Manchester requirements (P0)¶

• Parse and serialize Manchester OWL Syntax via horned-functional + horned-owl in strixonomy-owl (ADR-0016)
• Optional: evaluate owl-ms-language-server for embedded Manchester assist in webview (v0.5)
• Autocomplete: classes, properties, individuals in scope, XSD datatypes, OBO ids (OBO_ROBOT_SPEC.md)
• Parse errors from Horned-OWL → LSP diagnostics with file range
• Open in Manchester action from Entity Inspector for any editable axiom
• Live Turtle patch preview before apply

5. Write-back rules¶

Patches are generated from Horned-OWL axiom objects, not string templates.

1. Apply minimal source-range patch per ADR-0006
2. Preserve unrelated triples, comments, and @prefix blocks
3. Show diff preview in VS Code before multi-file changes
4. All edits undoable via VS Code

Round-trip test suite (required for v1.0)¶

• Fixtures: Protégé-exported Turtle ontologies in examples/protege-roundtrip/
• Flow: load → index → edit axiom via API → save → semantic equivalence (formatting variance allowed)
• CI gate: cargo test protege_roundtrip

6. LSP / custom methods¶

See LSP_SPEC.md:

• strixonomy/applyAxiomPatch
• strixonomy/parseManchester

7. UI wireframes¶

See UI_WIREFRAMES.md §8–§9.

8. Milestone mapping¶