Overview

VIVO provides the capability to add ontologies and use them to describe your data and for query.  You can add your own, or pre-existing ontologies.  In each case, the ontology to be added will appear in the VIVO Ontology list and can be used.

Web Interface

You can add a The most straightforward way to load additional ontologies into VIVO is to use the Add/Remove RDF Data feature shown on the Site Admin page.  This loads an ontology directly into the triple store.  The disadvantage is that all additional ontologies and local edits are loaded into a single graph.  This can make it cumbersome to update individual ontologies to reflect edits made outside of VIVO.

Filegraphs

There is another mechanism for incorporating ontologies into VIVO.  This involves "filegraphs," and is how the VIVO-ISF ontology is included with the software.  Filegraphs are RDF documents stored in the VIVO home directory.  Each filegraph corresponds to a single graph in the triple store.  Every time Tomcat starts, VIVO checks each of these graphs to ensure that its contents exactly match the triples found in the corresponding file.  If the file has changed, VIVO makes the necessary modifications to the triple store.  If a filegraph is removed from its directory, its graph in the triple store will be deleted the next time Tomcat starts.

Example

vitro.home/
    rdf/
        tbox/
            filegraph/
                agent.owl
                appControls-temp.n3
                bfo-bridge.owl
                bfo.owl
                ...
                myOntology.owl
                ...

...

Modifying or removing the myOntology.owl file in the filegraph directory and restarting Tomcat will automatically update the ontology VIVO.

Namespace Prefixes

Additional ontologies, whether directly imported via 'Add/Remove RDF data' or implemented as filegraphs, are listed in the ontology list ('Site Admin > Ontology list'). While the ontologies name and namespace are automatically added to the list, the prefix is not. Instead, the note '(not yet specified)' appears. This behavior occurs even if the prefix is correctly specified in the RDF file.

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