Supporting the understanding of ontologies for scientific knowledge graphs with the new version of LODE

2026-08-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of existing ontology documentation tools in supporting modular modeling and human readability, particularly in handling cross-module entities and annotations. To overcome these challenges, the authors refactor and extend the LODE framework by introducing a modular Reader-Model-Viewer architecture that decouples parsing, modeling, and rendering components. Implemented as a web service, the new framework provides enhanced capabilities for generating OWL ontology documentation, featuring dedicated entity pages, RDF provenance tracking, and Markdown-based rendering. These improvements significantly increase the intelligibility and reusability of modular scientific knowledge graph ontologies. The framework has been successfully applied to the documentation of the SKG-O ontology, demonstrating its practical utility and effectiveness.

Abstract

Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) rely on increasingly complex and heterogeneous semantic models, whose reuse and interoperability require ontologies and other semantic artefacts to be understandable by both machines and humans. However, existing ontology documentation tools provide limited support for modern reuse-oriented modelling practices, where entities are distributed across imported modules and enriched through cross-module annotations. This paper presents the new version of LODE, a re-engineered and extensible framework for generating human-readable documentation of semantic artefacts. LODE preserves the established single-page, W3C Recommendation-style documentation paradigm of its legacy predecessor, and introduces a modular architecture that separates artefact interpretation (Reader), internal representation (Model), and rendering (Viewer). Served as a web service, LODE supports the documentation of OWL ontologies and enables additional documentation features (e.g., entity stand-alone documentation, RDF entity provenance, Markdown rendering). We demonstrate the applicability of LODE through the documentation of the Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework ontology (SKG-O), showing how it improves the accessibility and reuse of modular scientific knowledge graph models.

Problem

• ontology documentation
• scientific knowledge graphs
• semantic interoperability
• modular ontologies
• human-readable documentation

Innovation

• modular ontology documentation
• semantic knowledge graphs
• LODE framework
• human-readable ontology
• ontology interoperability