Re: [xsl] XSL transformation of instances in an OWL ontology to HTML

[Emmanouil Batsis <Emmanouil.Batsis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fredrik wrote:

> Hey, I'm developing a very simple ontology in Protigi 3.0. Just to 
> give a brief introduction to the case: the three main classes are 
> Course, University and ProgrammeAI. There are properties/relations 
> between the classes, for example "Programme (hasCourse) Course" , 
> "Course (isCourseOf) Programme" and "ProgrammeAI (isProgrammeOf) 
> University". I want to use XSLT to be able to retrieve and show, in 
> HTML, different views of this data, for instance "which Courses are 
> part of which ProgrammeAI" or "which Courses can be found at which 
> Universities".


The main problem about RDF processing with XSLT is that the latter (due 
to it's use of XPath) is too dependent on structure, while RDF is a 
model that can be expressed in more than once structures. For example,

<a1:Human rdf:about="http://geekologue.com/ppl/manos"; a1:name="Manos" 
a1:surname="Batsis" />

is the same as

<a1:Human rdf:about="http://geekologue.com/ppl/manos"; a1:name="Manos">
   <a1:surname>Batsis</a1:surname>
</a1:Human>

or it could even be the same as

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://geekologue.com/ppl/manos";>
   <rdfs:instanceOf rdf:resource="&a1;Human"/>
   <a1:name>Manos</a1:name>
   <a1:surname>Batsis</a1:surname>
</rdf:Description>

etc. So it becomes very difficult to process a model with a structure 
based tool like XPath/XSLT.

Manos