Traveller ontology

[charvolant]

I've created a github repository with some starting bits and pieces.

The repository is called makhidkarun/Argushiigi To keep with the spirit of makhidkarun I borrowed from "Argushiigi Admegulasha Bilanidin" or "Vilani Repository of All Knowledge". Argushiigi means either repository or all knowledge -- my Vilani is not what it could be -- either works for me.

I've started with a basic RPG ontology so that I can capture concepts common to all RPGS (players, NPCs, skills, etc.) I'm trying to be as terminology-neutral as I can here.

If you want a tool to look at it, I would suggest Protege. If you want want the bother, you can browse some of the ontology here.

 

[charvolant]

Sample Server

I've set up a server so that people can explore some sample ontology and data. The server is at

http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/index.jsp

This provides some basic lists of settings and game entities. You can explore the various bits and pieces by clicking on them. Almost everything is linked in some way, so you can traverse from a specific instance to information about the various concepts that are displayed. References to external entities simply go there. References to URIs with the (made up) root of http://data.travellerrpg.com/ redirect to http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data with a special uri parameter for things with fragment identifiers.

I haven't had any reply from Far Future about the level of Traveller info that I can include in the ontology, so I've created a small RPG description called Generic Science Fiction (GSF) with a few attributes, skills etc. With a bit of luck, being able to view what's planned with un-freeze FFE.

Here are some trial URIs for you to play with:

http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/ontology/rpg

http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/ontology/gsf/sight
http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/ontology/gsf/oxygen-breather
http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/ontology/gsf/use-weapon
http://www.charvolant.org/argushiig...vellerrpg.com%2Fontology%2Frpg%23hasAttribute

All of these return nicely formatted HTML that can be read by a human. To view the data in other formats, use the links in the top-right of the HTML page, which will give you: RDF (RDF in XML form), TTL (RDF in Turtle form) and XML (an intermediate XML form that is used to generate presentation forms, such as HTML). You can also get the formats by appending ?format=<format> to the URL. For example

http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/ontology/gsf/sight?format=rdf

The HTML form uses the reasoning facilities to deduce information about whatever is there. For example, the NPC status of

http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/gsf/games/charvolant/wsk-1

is deduced from wsk-1 being portrayed by someone who is a game master. There's a fair bit of fiddling going on to remove redundant inferences from the display; it's not perfect yet.

The RDF/TTL forms simply give the raw information about the URI. It's intended for machine processing and I haven't made much effort to improve its human-readability.

Please feel free to explore. Feedback is solicited, encouraged and welcome.

 

[charvolant]

I now have the beginnings of a Traveller ontology.

To have a look at things, I've generated a T5 character and encoded it usiing the ontology. You can see the results at http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/examples/JherikAmdalu Practically any term will take you to a page with more information. The entry point is http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi which will give you some tables of start points¹

You can view the ontologies at https://github.com/makhidkarun/Argushiigi/tree/master/src/main/ontology The key bits are

rpg.owl - A generic upper ontology for RPG concepts (characters, players, attributes, skills, etc.)

t5.owl - An ontology that describes things that act as Traveller glue: characters, worlds, items etc. at a basic level. Other ontologies describe things in detail. For example, things like characteristics and skills are in t5.owl, since they affect so many things, career history is more specialised and goes in the characters ontology.

t5-characters.owl - detailed character information, such as career backstory, homeworlds and such-like.

argushiigi.owl - An ontology that describes how to display things on the website.

traveller-universe.rdf - Stuff specific to the Official Traveller Universe. Organisations such as the Imperium, the IISS and so on. This has been separated off to allow non-OTU settings to use the core ontologies.

There's lots of conceptual information encoded as SKOS concept hierarchies. For example, http://www.charvolant.org/argushiigi/data/rules/t5/ranks/rank is the top concept in the ranks scheme.

¹ There's a bug with stuff loading slowly at the start; if you get an error message, just reload

 

[charvolant]

Next update. I've been working on adequately documenting what is there, so that people can navigate through the ontologies. To do this, since there doesn't seem to be anything that generates the sort of diagrams that I want, I've developed a maven plugin called dossier that generates documentation, including diagrams for groups of ontologies.

You can view the documentation at http://makhidkarun.github.io/Argushiigi

Dossier is available at https://github.com/charvolant/dossier and is documented at http://charvolant.github.io/dossier/