databrickslabs / databrickslabs/ontobricks

[FEATURE]: Support creating integration ontologies

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#42 0 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@benoitcayladbx is already working on this.

Since Aug 3, 2026.

enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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Description

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Problem Statement

When modelling a complex domain it is standard practice to compose an integration ontology that uses owl:imports to pull in several focused sub-ontologies (a core domain, a regulatory vocabulary, an industry standard). Today OntoBricks ignores owl:imports declarations entirely, so any class or property defined only in an imported ontology is silently dropped. The only workaround is to pre-flatten all ontologies into a single file, destroying namespace separation and preventing reuse of sub-ontologies across multiple integration ontologies. Mappings must be flattened as well, and the knowledge graph duplicated into the integration domain. Bridges are a good first step, but doesn't allow the ontology models to reuse each other and truly integrate across domains.

Proposed Solution

Treat already-registered OntoBricks domains as first-class resolvable ontology sources. When an OWL/Turtle file is imported and the parser detects owl:imports triples, OntoBricks should resolve those imports against the registry.
There are many design questions that would need to be resolved for how the two ontologies would work together, these are at the top of my head:

  1. The two ontologies should ideally reference each other without duplication.
  2. It should be possible to create equivalentClass, subClassOf, hasRelationship between the linked ontologies - expanding the bridge implementation to work in the ontologies themself.
  3. The mappings and imported knowledge graph should be reused from the referenced domains.
Area

Ontology Management

Additional Context

No response

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