The AIDA Toolkit - a Tool for Users and Developers

Vocabularies in the form of ontologies and terminologies are becoming an accepted way of incorporating both logic and linguistic resources into biomedical applications. In order to perform search and annotation with biomedical ontologies and terminologies, users and developers must be able to access and browse vocabularies. However, accessing the contents of a repository requires not only a working knowledge of the SPARQL query language, but knowledge of the repository structure and contents in order to formulate a query. Using the web services in the AIDA Toolkit, we have developed a web-based repository browser that can quickly detect the type of RDF dialect used and extract hierarchies of interest based on common patterns, such as the subclass or subsumption hierarchy, displaying the hierarchy as an interactive outline view of the labels. This functionality makes it possible to explore the basic structure of a vocabulary served by most SPARQL endpoints and find specific terms via auto-completion without any prior knowledge of either the specific vocabulary, RDF, or the SPARQL query language. The combination of browsing knowledge resources available from triplestores with the ability to create more complex queries that build upon the elements of a vocabulary makes it easier to incorporate knowledge resources into applications that are customized and scoped by well-defined vocabularies.