Seed/example ontologies and ontology marketplace

[JohnRDOrazio]

Summary

When OntoKit is first installed, there are no ontologies available to demonstrate capabilities or test features. We should provide seed ontologies and/or an "ontology marketplace" where users can install example ontologies with one click.

Goals

1. Out-of-the-box demo experience — new installations should have something to explore immediately
2. Teaching/testing — example ontologies exercise different OWL features (class restrictions, reasoning, SKOS vocabularies, etc.)
3. Project templates — users starting real projects can import standard upper ontologies or vocabularies as a foundation

Candidate Ontologies

Small/Pedagogical (for demos and testing)

Ontology	Use Case	Notes
Pizza Ontology	Class restrictions, reasoning	The classic Protégé tutorial ontology
Wine Ontology	Deep hierarchy, individuals, property restrictions	W3C OWL Guide example
Koala Ontology	Reasoner behavior, unsatisfiable classes	Historically shipped with Protégé
Travel Ontology	Protégé tutorial companion	Destinations, accommodations, activities
African Wildlife Ontology	Teaching alternative to Pizza	CC-BY, from Keet's Intro to Ontology Engineering
Family/People Ontology	inverseOf, symmetric/transitive properties	Various versions (Stanford, Manchester)

Standard Vocabularies (for seeding real projects)

Ontology	Use Case
FOAF	People, organizations, social links
Dublin Core / DCTERMS	Metadata primitives
SKOS	Thesauri and controlled vocabularies
PROV-O	Provenance (W3C Rec)
OWL-Time	Temporal concepts
GeoSPARQL / WGS84	Spatial concepts
QUDT	Quantities, units, dimensions
schema.org (subset)	General-purpose types (CC-BY-SA)

Upper Ontologies

Ontology	Notes
BFO (Basic Formal Ontology)	Minimal upper; used by OBO Foundry
DOLCE-Lite	Richer, philosophically committed
SUMO	Large, GNU-licensed

Proposed UX

Two approaches (not mutually exclusive):

Option A: Pre-seeded examples

• Ship 2–3 small ontologies (e.g., Pizza, Wine, African Wildlife) as pre-created projects on fresh installs
• Marked as "Example" projects with a badge

Option B: Ontology Marketplace

• A catalog UI (accessible from dashboard or project creation flow)
• Categories: Teaching, Vocabularies, Upper Ontologies
• One-click install creates a new project pre-populated with the ontology
• Could eventually support community-contributed ontologies

Implementation Considerations

• Backend (ontokit-api): Import endpoint that accepts a URL or bundled .ttl/.owl file and creates a project
• Frontend (ontokit-web): Marketplace/catalog UI, install button, category filtering
• Licensing: All included ontologies must have redistribution-compatible licenses (verify each)
• Versioning: Pin to specific versions of external ontologies; provide update mechanism

TODO

• Verify licenses and source URLs for candidate ontologies
• Decide between pre-seeded vs. marketplace vs. both
• Design the catalog UI
• Implement backend import-from-URL endpoint
• Bundle selected ontologies or maintain a registry

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