What it is — WIDOCO (WIzard for DOCumenting Ontologies) generates enriched, customizable, human-readable ontology documentation through a GUI wizard or command line. It extends LODE for term documentation and integrates WebVOWL visualization, OOPS! evaluation, Licensius license metadata, PROV-O provenance, and Bubastis-based version changelogs.
Key concepts —
Keep publication metadata with the ontology as annotations when possible; the docs recommend this over a separate .properties file because embedded metadata is easier to maintain across releases.
Describe the vocabulary itself with stable namespace and prefix, name/title/description, creators and contributors, license, version IRI and version information, creation date, and a link to the previous version. WIDOCO uses the previous-version relation to generate changelogs and emits a W3C PROV-O-compliant provenance page.
Describe classes and properties with labels and definitions; optional term annotations cover examples, original source, rationale, deprecation, and status. Supported term statuses include unstable, testing, stable, and archaic.
Treat publication as more than an HTML page: WIDOCO supports content negotiation, multiple ontology serializations, JSON-LD snippets in generated HTML, imported-ontology handling, evaluation reports, and diagrams.
How you’d use it — Download the release JAR and run the GUI, or invoke java -jar widoco-VERSION-jar-with-dependencies.jar with a local ontology (-ontFile) or ontology URI (-ontURI) and an output folder. Docker and Maven/JitPack dependency workflows are also documented. Customize output through ontology annotations or config.properties; useful switches include multilingual generation, WebVOWL, OOPS!, imported terms, Apache publication bundles, section replacement, and serialization display controls. Inputs shown in the docs include Turtle/OWL ontology data, while generated publication support includes HTML plus Turtle, RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON-LD serialization links.
LLM angle — none stated
Pitfalls & lessons — A separate .properties file must be maintained independently, so ontology annotations are recommended. Entity-valued creator/contributor/publisher metadata is resolved only inside the ontology; external URI resolution is not supported. Generated split-section HTML may appear incomplete when opened directly from the local filesystem because browsers block local section loading; use -uniteSections or serve the files, noting that the LODE visualization is unavailable in the local united-file case. The JAR requires Java 8 or newer.
Verdict — A focused ontology publication utility for turning annotated ontologies into customizable, standards-aware documentation, provenance, visualization, evaluation, and version-change artifacts.