NeoNeoLogism

Netage B.V. created a reboot of NeoLogism and simple RDF vocabulary authoring and publishing tool for the web of data.
Some people who have been around for a while in the SemWeb/RDF space might know Neologism, a simple web based RDFS vocabulary management tool created by Deri institute in Galway Ireland.

Neologism is a simple RDF/RDFS vocabulary authoring and publishing tool, nothing like Topbraid, Protégé , vocbench or Poolparty.
It aims at being simple but expressive enough to do subclasses and subproperties and various forms of relations (domain/range, disjoint etc.)
The nice part is that once you host it on a specific domain, all the vocabularies you create are directly dereferencable and usable by e.g. LOV

Since it was left largely unmaintained for years it now suffers from both incompatibilities with current PHP versions, but also dependencies on stone aged Drupal version (5) with all the security problems that come with it. Upgrading it to newer versions is cumbersome since some of the dependencies lack similar support.

We set out to create a reboot of the tool, NeoNeoLogism

At Netage B.V. we have been using the tool for a long time to host some of our vocabularies but now run into serious functionality issues due to the outdated support.
Since we are developing most of our own tools we set out to create a reboot of the tool, NeoNeoLogism, since we are a Java shop we created it in Java this time around.
We already used a largely extended version for some of our projects, which includes the ability to create data shapes, and now feel it is time to put it out in the open.
The aim for a V1 would be to mimic the behavior of the original project so that we can replace some of our now failing instances of the original product.

Opensource tool and of course FREE to use

NeoNeologism will be an opensource tool and of course FREE to use.

Quick feature list:

  • Support for subclasses, subproperties, domains, ranges, inverses, disjointness, functional and inverse functional properties
  • Support for XSD datatypes
  • Turtle and JSON-LD output
  • Vocabularies are served with content negotiation
  • Import from file or from the Web
  • Mapping to external vocabularies
  • Follows the W3C’s Best Practice for publishing RDF vocabularies and Cool URIs for the Semantic Web guidelines

What NeoNeologism is not:

  • NeoNeologism is no ontology editor. If you want to build large and complex domain ontologies, if you need the full power of OWL, or if you need sophisticated reasoning services, consider applications such as TopBraid Composer, Protégé, or the NeOn Toolkit. NeoNeologism is designed for the simpler space of RDF vocabularies. OWL ontologies tend to be about modeling a domain with the formal language of logics; RDF vocabularies thend to be about exchanging and integrating data between systems and on the Web.
  • NeoNeologism is no hosted service. To use NeoNeologism, you need to install it on your own web server. We do not run a hosted service where you could just sign up for an account and start creating vocabularies.
  • NeoNeologism is NOT YET a SKOS editor. The Simple Knowledge Organization Scheme (SKOS) is an RDF-based format for expressing and exchanging taxonomies, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies. NeoNeologism does not support SKOS yet. It only supports RDF Schema, plus selected constructs from OWL. Limitations

The current version of Neologism has some limitations that you should be aware of before deciding whether it is the right tool for you.

  • No permission system. If you create an account for another user on your system, then that user has access to all vocabularies. There is no way of restricting access to certain vocabularies, or to separate groups of users from each other. You should use Neologism only for groups of users where everyone trusts each other.
  • No versioning. Changes to a vocabulary cannot be undone and no revision log is kept.
  • This version only supports Monolingual vocabularies. There is no support for adding labels/comments in more than one language.

In the meantime keep an eye on the github repository for the first public release.