BUILDING OWL ONTOLOGY IN FEDORA DIGITAL REPOSITORY

Abstract

Digital repositories find more and more applications in various information systems and especially in e-learning systems. Along with storing digital objects the repositories need to also to represent domain knowledge, user profiles, multilanguage classification taxonomies, etc. This could be achieved by using ontologies represented in OWL. The Fedora digital repository is one of most powerful repositories. It supports relationships between the digital objects that are expressed in the RDF language. This allows implementation of OWL ontologies in Fedora. In this paper we describe in details our approach to represent OWL Lite ontologies in Fedora. We have also implemented a web based ontology editor that allows easy definition, modification and storing OWL ontologies in Fedora. The editor is written in PHP, uses the Fedora services for the interface with the repository and AJAX (jQuery) for building the user interface. The paper discusses also the architecture and the implementation of the editor.