Re: [protege-user] Merging Imported Ontologies

>
> Why not saving an offline version (as .ttl file(s), say) of the ontology
> (or each of the ontologies) you want to import, and then importing the
> files locally into your ontology (rather than importing them from the web)?
> This way, if the imported ontology gets updated, the changes won't be
> applied unless you manually update the saved version on your local system.
> So you can update the imported ontology(s) at your will, but things won't
> get out of hand if sudden dramatic changes happen to the imported ontology.


That's what I do now and it's always worked for me, because usually what I
care about is an application (which is built on an ontology) so issues
about staying consistent with the imported ontologies never mattered much.
I just use them and then I don't care if they change in the future because
it won't affect the system, and that's usually what I care about. Also,
usually when I import ontologies like SKOS or Prov, I don't use the entire
ontology anyway so even more reason, I'm not that concerned about future
evolutions. The difference is this time I'm helping someone who doesn't
want to build an application but a new reusable vocabulary that imports
several other vocabularies. So I thought it might make sense to be a big
more rigorous and thoughtful about imports and to see if anyone had any
suggestions, if there were issues I wasn't thinking about, etc.

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 3:54 AM Hyacinth <[email protected]> wrote:

> Greetings
>
> Why not saving an offline version (as .ttl file(s), say) of the ontology
> (or each of the ontologies) you want to import, and then importing the
> files locally into your ontology (rather than importing them from the web)?
> This way, if the imported ontology gets updated, the changes won't be
> applied unless you manually update the saved version on your local system.
> So you can update the imported ontology(s) at your will, but things won't
> get out of hand if sudden dramatic changes happen to the imported ontology.
>
> I remember to have experienced some bugs in using local imports in the
> past, though not remembering exactly what the problem was and not sure
> whether it still exists.
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 3:44 AM Michael DeBellis <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> I was helping someone start a new research project today where she is
>> going to start by leveraging several diverse vocabularies from different
>> domains. I showed her how to import an ontology.
>>
>> When I do this, I typically merge the ontologies because in the past I've
>> had issues with imported ontologies. In the worst case, I often download
>> things like Prov to my local drive and then import that way. Of course that
>> leads to problems if I share the ontology because that path won't exist on
>> someone else's machine. So one bit of advice I gave my colleague was to not
>> do that and import from the URL rather than their local drive.
>>
>> But I'm wondering should one still merge the ontologies in this situation
>> or not? After I do the Merge I usually delete the ontology import that
>> shows up at the bottom of the Active Ontology tab. That way there won't be
>> any issues with loading an ontology and not being able to load it because a
>> server for an imported ontology is down. On the other hand, it seems that
>> to have an audit trail, it is better to leave those import statements. I
>> think (although I haven't tested this) if you do the merge and an imported
>> (and merged) ontology isn't available it won't matter because you can just
>> say skip finding that import and the entities will still be there.
>>
>> A related issue is what if an imported ontology changes? Not merging and
>> having the Import statement seems the "right" way to do it because you
>> would get the new version. On the other hand, if you are under a deadline
>> and you suddenly have to deal with a bunch of changes to one of the
>> imported ontologies that could be a pain.
>>
>> Just wondering what people think are the trade offs here between:
>> 1) Whether or not to merge an imported ontology and
>> 2) Whether or not to delete the import statement if you do merge the
>> imported ontology?
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any opinions,
>> Michael
>> https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog
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