abcoates / dowl

Generate docs for RDF/OWL Schema

A simple command-line tool for generating HTML documentation from RDFS/OWL schemas.

This is a fork of the original DOWL project at https://github.com/ldodds/dowl. This fork adds the following features:

• It reads a whole directory of .owl files and generates one site for them
• It generates all kinds of diagrams: Class Diagrams, Individuals Diagrams, Import Diagram
• It detects more Dublin Core statements

INSTALLATION

Installation on Mac OS X:

Installation on Mac OS X

Installation on Ubuntu

apt-get install ruby rake gem

General

Install all libraries used by DOWL:

[sudo] gem install ffi rdf rdf-raptor rdf-json rdf-trix sxp sparql ruby-graphviz

This version of DOWL is not yet available as a "gem" itself so it needs to be downloaded from Github:

mkdir ~/downloads
cd ~/downloads
wget http://github.com/jgeluk/dowl/tarball/master -O dowl.tar.gz
tar xvf dowl.tar.gz
#
# Remember the name of the root directory of the unpacked tarball
# which looks like jgeluk-dowl-5ba77f5
#
sudo rm -rf /opt/dowl
sudo mv ~/dowloads/jgeluk-dowl-5ba77f5 /opt/dowl
cd /opt/dowl
sudo rake install

Or get it with git:

rm -rf /opt/dowl
cd /opt
git clone [e-mail]:jgeluk/dowl.git
cd /opt/dowl
sudo rake install

Usage

Execute bin/dowl to see usage options:

user@host:/opt/dowl# /opt/dowl/bin/dowl 
Output will be generated in this directory: /opt/dowl
Usage: dowl [<options>]

Specific options:
    -i, --ontology FILES             Read input FILES
    -o, --output DIR                 Write HTML output to DIR
    -t, --template DIR               Use ERB templates in DIR
        --no-vann                    Skip looking for vann:preferedNamespacePrefix

Common options:
    -?, -h, --help                   Show this message
    -V, --version                    Show version
    -v, --verbose                    Show verbose logging

For example, to generate a site for the PROV ontology, download the prov owl file and run DOWL as follows:

/opt/dowl/bin/dowl -i /root/downloads/prov/*.owl -o /var/www/prov