How to (properly) publish a vocabulary or ontology in the web (part 3.5 of 6)

This is a short post that I want to write to expand on my previous part of the tutorial (how to create a nice human readable documentation for your vocabulary/ontology). Since I have been releasing some vocabularies lately, I have developed a simple tool that generates the main structure of an html document describing the resource with the 11 parts I introduced on my previous post (title and date, metadata, abstract, table of contents, introduction, namespace declarations, overview of classes and properties, description, Cross reference section, references and acknowledgements).

This tool does not intend to replace any of the other tools designed to describe the properties and classes of an ontology. In fact, it rather acts as wrapper using LODE for that very purpose in one of the sections (the cross reference section). So, why should you use it?

  1. It saves time by providing the whole structure of the html document.
  2. It doesn’t require you to add any RDF metadata to the ontology being described. The URI of the ontology itself is optional. All metadata can be configured in the config.properties file of the project (see readme for more info).
  3. It automatically adds the metadata as rdf-a annotations to the document, which makes it easier to parse by machines.

I have uploaded the tool to Github, and it’s available here, along with the code I used.

As stated, I have used LODE for one of the sections of the document. I have already added LODE in the acknowledgements. If you use this tool please make sure to acknowledge any tool you use to generate your documentation.

This is part of a tutorial divided in 7 parts:

  1. Overview of the tutorial.
  2. (Reqs addressed A1(partially), A2, A3, A4, P1) Publishing your vocabulary at a stable URI using RDFS/OWL.
  3. (Reqs addressed P2, P3). How to design a human readable documentation.
  4. Extra: A tool for creating html readable documentation (this post)
  5. (Reqs addressed P4). Derreferencing your vocabulary.
  6. (Reqs addressed A1 (partially)). Dealing with the license. (To appear)
  7. (Reqs addressed A5, P5). Reusing other vocabularies. (To appear)