Manage annotations

Annotations are commonly used to add information to classes, instances, properties as well as ontologies themselves. Annotations usually record information such as who is the creator, what was the last update date, what are the readable labels and comments for ontology elements. RDFS has several built-in annotation properties. They are:

The OWL vocabulary adds one more annotation property - owl:versionInfo.

All these properties are available in TopBraid Composer. In addition, many ontologies import Dublin Core vocabulary. If your ontology imports Dublin Core, Composer will make all dc elements available as annotation properties.

You can enter values for annotation properties when you first define a resource or when you modify it later on. In addition to being able to define annotations on the 'one by one' basis, Composer provides a convenient spreadsheet-like view where annotations across all resources can be viewed and edited.

To access this dialog select ModelManage annotations... Select the annotation property you want to view or edit from the drop down box at the top of the dialog. Scroll up and down to view and edit annotation values. In particular, this dialog has a feature to automatically generate labels from the name (in the left column). For example, if a resource is called hasCountryOfOrigin, then the system would create a label "has country of origin".

Annotations can be exported (saved) into a comma-delimited file.