Package athene-owlapi

This package provides an OWL API that provides as an implementation as close as possible to the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Structural Specification.

Part of the Athene project.

As the OWL 2 Structural Specification relies heavily on an object-oriented model with inheritence of key concepts there has had to be a mapping from the modeling in the specification to the API herein. That mapping can be describe as follows.

1. Parent types, which are usually abstract, in the OWL 2 specification are present in the API as enumerated types.
   1. The strum crate provides is_{variant} and trye_as_{variant} methods on the enum to access sub-types.
   2. As all sub-types are distinct each super-type provides implementations of From between parent and each child type.
2. Attributes present on parent types are pushed down (replicated) on all sub-types; however, accessors are present on the enumeration for these attributes.
3. Constructors, usually new(...), are provided for simple cases such as Declaration with more complex cases using a builder pattern.

As the primary goal in the design of the package interface is consistency with the OWL 2 structural specification, rather than writing documentation from scratch we will rely on the text of the OWL specification. Each section of Rust documentation will have a sub-section titled Specification (Section X.Y) denoting the source location. Examples in the Rust documentation will reference examples in the same section of the source, with the OWL functional syntax shown with Rust equivalent when relevant.

Examples

Given the following source in the OWL functional syntax.

Prefix(:=<http://www.example.com/ontology1#>)
Ontology( <http://www.example.com/ontology1>
    Import( <http://www.example.com/ontology2> )
    Annotation( rdfs:label "An example" )
    SubClassOf( :Child owl:Thing )
)

The following Rust code will generate

use athene_owlapi::{
    Ontology, OntologyDocument,
    axioms::SubClassOf,
    builders::{AnnotationBuilder, Builder},
    entities::{Class, EntityTrait},
    things::owl,
};
use rdftk_iri::Iri;
use std::str::FromStr;

let document = OntologyDocument::builder()
   .with_default_namespace(Iri::from_str("http://www.example.com/ontology1#").unwrap())
   .with_ontology(Ontology::builder()
       .with_ontology_iri(Iri::from_str("http://www.example.com/ontology1").unwrap())
       .with_direct_import(Iri::from_str("http://www.example.com/ontology2").unwrap())
       .with_rdfs_label("An example")
       .with_class_axiom(SubClassOf::new(
           Class::new(Iri::from_str("http://www.example.com/ontology1#Child").unwrap()),
           Class::new(owl::thing_iri()),
       ))
       .build()
       .expect("could not build Ontology"))
   .build()
   .expect("could not build OntologyDocument");

Status

API Coverage

Currently all of the OWL 2 structural specification is covered.

Builders/Erognomics

Reader Robustness

Pretty poor, it's currently only implemented for happy path cases.

The following are still to be done.

• Move type conversion (string -> Iri, etc.) from Semantic to Parser layer.
• Ensure semantic layer performs all cardinality checking.
• Handle unexpected nodes.
• Recover and continue where possible.
• Usage of Ariadne for user-facing errors.

Documentation

Most documentation copied from the specification is now present, few examples from the specification are present, and of those even fewer have Rust equivalents.

Test Coverage

Poor.

License(s)

The contents of this repository are made available under the following licenses:

Apache-2.0

Copyright 2025 Simon Johnston <johnstonskj@gmail.com>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

See the enclosed file LICENSE-Apache.

MIT

Copyright 2025 Simon Johnston <johnstonskj@gmail.com>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

See the enclosed file LICENSE-MIT.