Access to entities of one ontology through another ontology.

[Babroo]

Hello,

I am working on a project which consists of several ontologies that have a hierarchical structure. And the top ontology must have access to lower ones and access to their classes and individuals and properties. In Protege this is possible with importing one ontology to another. But I found out the "imported_ontologies" attribute of Owlready is not suitable for my task.
Is there any solution?

[gp]

Hello Barbroo,

Could you explain why the imported_ontologies attribute is not suitable? I do routinely things which I would think are exactly this, but I could have missed something...

Cheers,
GP

[Babroo]

Hi,

The imported_ontologies attribute is not suitable only for my task (I am working on a project which consists of several ontologies that have a hierarchical structure. And the top ontology must have access to the classes and individuals and properties and axioms of lower ontologies). But the protege has this possiblity.
Also when reasoner run, it will run on all ontologies and if there is relation between different ontologies entiites, it will show them.

[gp]

Well, so we have the same use case.
As already answered by JiBa, you may use the default_world object or some specific one if you defined one to access the entities. I found it convenient to use SPARQL queries at times to perform such operations, otherwise you might just navigate the classes following the specific properties defined in your ontology(ies).
I am not sure about the reasoner from within owlready as I did not use it extensively. My few attempts seem to demonstrate it did make use of all imported assertions, not only these of the top ontology though.

Hope this helps,
GP