Republish externally managed ontologies

What capability do you want added or improved?

The ability to accept a URL of a remote ontology, read in that ontology, and 
provide MMI 
ontology services that correspond to the ones provided for local ontologies. I 
think these 
services include:
 - look up a URI for a term in the ontology, and find the term and its metadata
 - keep track of versions of the ontology, and changes to each version
 - find terms and definitions in the ontology using our search capabilities
 - present browsable descriptions of the ontology, its metadata, and its terms
 - provide a mappable resource in the form of a URI; this may be one of the following
    - a URI specified within the original ontology, in its namespace
    - a URI that builds on the original ontology's namespace (adding /term or #term)
    - a URI in mmisw's namespace that represents the term itself (dicey)
    - a URI in mmisw's namespace that represents an alias to the term (dicey)
    - a URI in mmisw's namespace that represents a new resource, call it a 'term reference' (dicey)
   See last section for more discussion of this.

Where do you want this capability to be accessible?

Ideally, seamlessly wherever our internally managed ontologies are kept. 

What sort of input/command mechanism do you want?

The same as when people currently submit an ontology they have edited/created 
with Protege: a 
web interface that has a button for uploading locally or from the web

What is the desired output (content, format, location)?

As seamless as is reasonable with the existing MMI internal ontologies. 

Other details of your desired capability?

Next step will be to configure the polling of the address, so that changes are 
automatically 
picked up and versioned.

What version of the product are you using?

Please provide any additional information below (particular ontology/ies, text 
contents of 
vocabulary (voc2rdf), operating system, browser/version (Firefox, Safari, IE, 
etc.), screenshot, 
etc.)

If an ontology provider does not version its own ontology, than none of the 
ontology releases will 
have any versioned resource URIs. So if we provide versioned URIs (in our 
namespace) for their 
ontology, that are additional to the unversioned URIs in the ontology, we are 
not creating a 
duplicated resource space.  In that scenario, the unversioned URI in our name 
space will not be a 
resource URI; it can both provide the services we provide for the ontology 
(description, html, 
metadata, visualization) and offer the redirect to their page (if any) and the 
actual resource they 
define for their ontology.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by grayb...@mbari.org on 12 Nov 2008 at 12:32
Letractively / mmisw

Republish externally managed ontologies #42
