README.md

Ontology Explorer

The Ontology explorer allows a user to ask a few basic questions of the ontology:

• What fields are associated with a type name?
• What are the types associated with a given set of fields?
• Is a field defined within a certain namespace?

Install

To install please follow the instructions below.

Create a Virtual Environment

First, create a virtual environment with venv followed by the environment name (in this example: tooling) in the digitalbuildings repository.

python -m venv tooling

Activate the Virtual Environment

Mac OS / Linux:

source tooling/bin/activate

Windows

tooling\Scripts\activate

Install Packages

Next, you can either use pip or setup (to be deprecated) to install the necessary packages and dependencies.

Pip

1. Run the following command to ensure that your Python package management tools are up-to-date.

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

2. Run python3 -m pip install . from the following directories:

• digitalbuildings/tools/validators/ontology_validator
• digitalbuildings/tools/validators/instance_validator
• digitalbuildings/tools/explorer

Setup (to be deprecated)

To install the dependencies, please run python setup.py install from the following directories, in order:

• digitalbuildings/tools/validators/ontology_validator
• digitalbuildings/tools/validators/instance_validator
• digitalbuildings/tools/explorer

Usage

There are two main ways in which the ontology explorer can be used:

1. Import explorer_handler from explorer.lib and call Build()

   • This returns an OntologyWrapper object which can be used to execute query functions on the Digital Buildings Ontology. You may also pass to Build() a path to an ontology extension.

2. As a stand-alone command-line interface (CLI).

   • Run python explorer.py to start the application.
   • If you have extended the ontology by adding new types to your local ontology, run the following: python explorer.py --modified-ontology-types=path/to/modified/ontology/types/folder