Neologism is a web-based RDF Schema vocabulary editor and publishing system. With Neologism, you can define vocabularies, consisting of classes and properties. These are the building blocks that enable a growing number of web sites to share not just documents, images, videos and applications, but also linked data on the web. The main goal of Neologism is to dramatically reduce the time required to create, publish and modify vocabularies for the web of data.
Quick feature list
- Support for subclasses, subproperties, domains, ranges, inverses, disjointness, functional and inverse functional properties
- Support for XSD datatypes
- RDF/XML and N3 output
- Vocabularies are served with content negotiation
- Customizable class diagram
- Import from file or from the Web
- Mapping to external vocabularies
- Follows the W3C's Best Practice for publishing RDF vocabularies and Cool URIs for the Semantic Web guidelines
What Neologism is not
Neologism is no ontology editor. If you want to build large and complex domain ontologies, if you need the full power of OWL, or if you need sophisticated reasoning services, consider applications such as TopBraid Composer, Protégé, or the NeOn Toolkit. Neologism is designed for the simpler space of RDF vocabularies. OWL ontologies tend to be about modelling a domain with the formal language of logics; RDF vocabularies thend to be about exchanging and integrating data between systems and on the Web.
Neologism is no hosted service. To use Neologism, you need to install it on your own web server. We do not run a hosted service where you could just sign up for an account and start creating vocabularies.
Neologism is no SKOS editor. The Simple Knowledge ORganization Scheme (SKOS) is an RDF-based format for expressing and exchanging taxonomies, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies. Neologism does not support SKOS. It only supports RDF Schema, plus selected constructs from OWL.
Limitations
The current version of Neologism has some limitations that you should be aware of before deciding wether it is the right tool for you.
No permission system. If you create an account for another user on your system, then that user has access to all vocabularies. There is no way of restricting access to certain vocabularies, or to separate groups of users from each other. You should use Neologism only for groups of users where everyone trusts each other.
No versioning. Changes to a vocabulary cannot be undone and no revision log is kept.
Monolingual vocabularies. There is no support for adding labels/comments in more than one language.
We hope to address these limitations in future versions.
Minimum requirements
Full details are available on the Minimum Requirements page, but the gist is:
- Web server that can run PHP 5.2 and supports Drupal Clean URLs (Apache with mod_rewrite recommended)
- MySQL or PostgreSQL database (MySQL 4.1 or higher recommended)
Neologism is built on Drupal
Drupal is a powerful open source content management platform that powers millions of websites. Neologism is built on Drupal 6. The core of Neologism is a Drupal module. But we distribute it as an installation profile, a pre-configured site that you can install on your web server.
In theory, you can install the Neologism module into an existing Drupal site, but Neologism doesn't always play perfectly with existing sites. We work on improving this, but could use some help here from experienced Drupal developers and Drupal site administrators.
Neologism is currently not available through Drupal.org, the main Drupal community's website. Again, this is something we intend to fix.