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WebVOWL

  • What it is — WebVOWL is a browser UI for presenting ontology visualizations, with OWL2VOWL providing the conversion backend. The documented full-stack deployment combines both under one Tomcat origin, while a frontend-only deployment omits file and IRI conversion.

  • Key concepts —

    • OWL2VOWL converts ontology files into VOWL-specific JSON for presentation by WebVOWL.
    • The legacy documentation names OWL, RDF, and TTL as watched ontology inputs; current operator docs demonstrate posting an RDF ontology to /convert.
    • The UI and converter are expected on the same origin because WebVOWL uses relative /convert and /serverTimeStamp endpoints.

  • How you’d use it — Run the full stack with docker compose build && docker compose up -d --wait, then open http://localhost:8080; the image clones and builds OWL2VOWL and exposes /convert. A frontend-only Compose setup is available when conversion is unnecessary. For development, install Node dependencies, build with the npm/Grunt tasks, and serve deploy/; visualizations can be exported as SVG, provided the CSS-inlining code is kept synchronized with vowl.css.

  • LLM angle — none stated

  • Pitfalls & lessons —

    • The old visualdataweb.org URL is no longer owned by VisualDataWeb, and the legacy WAR download host is broken or compromised; the accepted Docker design builds OWL2VOWL from source instead.
    • Separating the UI and converter across two unproxied origins breaks the relative /convert integration.
    • Docker builds require network access to clone OWL2VOWL; pin OWL2VOWL_GIT_REF for reproducible releases.
    • The documented build toolchain retains end-of-life Node 12 and Java 8.
    • SVG export requires CSS rules to be inlined; changing vowl.css without regenerating the inlining code makes the exported image differ from the displayed graph.
    • The repository was migrated from internal SVN and cleaned with git filter-branch, so its commit history may contain oddities.

  • Verdict — A focused browser visualization frontend with a documented OWL-to-VOWL conversion path and workable local deployment, but with a legacy toolchain and notable deployment-history hazards.

Sources consulted

  • README.md
  • docs/adr/README.md
  • docs/adr/0001-docker-local-development.md
  • docker/README.md
  • doc/Docker/README.md
  • util/VowlCssToD3RuleConverter/README.md