Help

Introduction

This is a standard Plone site. General help on using Plone can be found at plone.org. The aim of the site is to show that with only an OWL ontology and standard Plone, users can begin to add new information to a web site about things described in the ontology and can begin to use this information as links in their documents and as the object of searches and summarisation tables.

The simple toy ontology used for this site can be seen on the front page. It describes the following classes: Student, Person, Course, GraduateCourse. These are all turned into content types for the Plone Content Management System.

Viewing the Ontology-Based Content

Content given by public instances of the classes mentioned in the ontology can be found in /Instances. It should be noted this is the default Plone way to display content. Typically, a web designer will be found to style the general page layout and the pages used to display content.

The content is also accessible to global searches, through the general search form on the left of each page, or through collections (such as Sample Collection), which are specially tailored searches that are defined through web forms by site administrator.

At the top of each instance from the ontology (in AI Course, for example) is a tab named "RDF N3" where the RDF triple form of the object can be found.

Creating and Editing Ontology-Based Content

Who can create and edit content is defined by the Plone authentication system and the workflow associated with the particular type of content. In this demo site we have defined a user named guest (password: triplify), and given this user the contributor privileges needed to create new content and edit that content. The fields to login are on the left of each page.

Once logged in, the guest user will begin to see "Add new..." pulldown menus near the top of the Instances web page. In that menu are items for "Graduate Student" etc, that are from classes defined in the ontology. Selecting those items brings the user to forms that have been automatically generated from the ontology to handle each field appropriately - date widgets for properties of type XML Schema Date, for example.

Once the edit forms are saved the newly entered data will be visible to the web site and will be seen in searches and the listings such as Instances. The data will not, however, be visible to users that are not logged into the site. That is because the default workflow of a Plone site, in keeping with a typical Content Management System, requires that someone with reviewer privileges makes the data publicly visible.