Welcome to Cowl’s documentation!

Cowl is a lightweight C/C++ API for working with OWL 2 ontologies, developed by SisInf Lab at the Polytechnic University of Bari.

About

• What is this?
  • Motivation
  • Features
  • Limitations
  • Publications
  • Projects
  • License

Getting started

• How-to
  • Building from source
    • Requirements
    • Downloading the sources
    • Compiling
    • Linking
  • Programming with Cowl
    • API initialization
    • Ontology deserialization
    • Ontology queries
    • Ontology editing and writing
  • Under the hood
    • Memory management
    • Pseudo-inheritance
• Examples
  • Reading ontologies
  • Handling of errors and imports
  • Querying ontologies
    • Basic queries
    • Recursive queries
    • Advanced queries
  • Editing and writing ontologies
  • Ontology streams
    • Input streams
    • Output streams

API docs

• Configuration
  • Initialization
  • Handlers and defaults
  • Library version
• Working with ontologies
  • The ontology manager
  • Reading ontologies
    • Readers
    • Handling imports
    • Reading ontologies as axiom streams
  • Querying and editing ontologies
    • The ontology object
    • Querying ontologies
    • Editing ontologies
  • Writing ontologies
    • Writers
    • Writing ontologies as axiom streams
  • Handling errors
• Data model
  • Base types
    • Objects
      • Object types
      • Placeholder types
    • Numeric types
      • Return codes
      • Flags
        • Iteration over primitives
        • Construct position
    • Strings
    • Collections
      • Vector
      • Hash table
  • Entities and primitives
    • Classes
    • Datatypes
    • Object properties
    • Data properties
    • Annotation properties
    • Individuals
      • Named individuals
      • Anonymous individuals
    • IRIs
  • Class expressions
    • Classes
    • Boolean class expressions
      • Intersection and union
      • Complement
    • Object property restrictions
      • Existential and universal quantification
      • Individual value restriction
      • Self restriction
      • Cardinality restriction
    • Data property restrictions
      • Existential and universal quantification
      • Literal value restriction
      • Cardinality restriction
    • Individual enumeration
  • Data ranges
    • Datatypes
    • Boolean data ranges
      • Intersection and union
      • Complement
    • Datatype restrictions
    • Literal enumeration
  • Literals
  • Properties
    • Object property expressions
      • Object properties
      • Inverse object properties
    • Data property expressions
      • Data properties
    • Annotation properties
  • Axioms
    • Declarations and definitions
      • Declaration
      • Datatype definition
    • Class expression axioms
      • Subclasses
      • Equivalent and disjoint classes
      • Disjoint union
    • Object property axioms
      • Object subproperties
      • Equivalent and disjoint object properties
      • Inverse object properties
      • Object property domain
      • Object property range
      • Object property characteristics
    • Data property axioms
      • Data subproperties
      • Equivalent and disjoint data properties
      • Data property domain
      • Data property range
      • Functional data properties
    • Assertions
      • Class assertions
      • Object property assertions
      • Data property assertions
      • Same and different individuals
    • Annotation axioms
      • Annotation assertions
      • Annotation subproperties
      • Annotation property domain
      • Annotation property range
    • Keys
  • Annotations
    • Annotation values
    • Annotation axioms
      • Annotation assertions
      • Annotation subproperties
      • Annotation property domain
      • Annotation property range
  • Vocabulary
    • OWL vocabulary
    • RDF vocabulary
    • RDFS vocabulary
    • XSD vocabulary