Smartlogic welcomes guest blogger Mark Leher, COO at WAND Inc.
I recently participated in the Smartlogic/WAND webinar “Discover Practical Solutions for Cloud-Based Information Governance”. In this blog, I wanted to take the opportunity to show you how easy it is to import a WAND pre-built ontology into the Semaphore Cloud environment. Starting with a pre-built ontology lets you jump-start ontology development so you can immediately begin to manage your information.
WAND has pre-built ontologies for almost every business topic and can be imported into the Semaphore Cloud environment in a matter of moments.
To begin, you’ll need to select and download an ontology from the WAND Taxonomy Library Portal. Using the example below, we’ll demonstrate how to import the WAND Human Resources Ontology, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - WAND Taxonomy Portal
The ontology will be downloaded as an XML file with a TTL file extension. TTL is a specific type of RDF file that is commonly used in semantic and ontology modeling.
Once the TTL file has been downloaded, it’s time to import it into the Semaphore Ontology Editor in the Cloud. From the Semaphore Ontology Editor home screen (Figure 2), we’ll first create a new model by clicking on the gray tile and entering “WAND HR” in the name selection. This will create an empty model, as shown in the lower left of Figure 2.
Figure 2 - Semaphore Ontology Editor
Clicking on the WAND HR model tile will open the model and take you to the interface where we can edit this specific model (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 - Opening the model in Semaphore Ontology Editor
At this point, we can either begin creating a model from scratch or we can import the WAND HR Ontology which will instantly populate the model with the pre-built concepts. To import the ontology, click on the menu icon to the right of “Master” in the header and choose “Import”.
Next, as shown in Figure 4, simply navigate to the TTL file that was downloaded from the WAND Taxonomy Library Portal.
Figure 4 - Navigate to TTL file
Success! The WAND Human Resources Ontology has been imported and now appears in the Semaphore Cloud Ontology Editor, as shown in Figure 5. The ontology is ready to be tailored to meet your organization’s needs; irrelevant concepts can be removed, additional concepts can be added, alternative labels and new relationships between concepts can be created.
Figure 5 - WAND taxonomy in Semaphore Ontology Editor
As you can see, building an ontology doesn’t have to belong and a painful process. In the Semaphore Cloud environment, ontologies can be imported into Ontology Editor to speed up the model building process. The WAND ontology and Semaphore platform let you quickly begin to leverage your ontology and metadata so that you can effectively manage, govern, harmonize, discover and use ALL the valuable information within your organization for key decision making.
