VocDoc

Posted by Knud on March 8th, 2009

VocDoc is a little Ruby script which produces documentation for OWL/RDFS ontologies and vocabularies. There are options to produce either an HTML page to put as documentation online (in a style very similar to the FOAF specification), or LaTeX code to include in larger LaTeX documents, such as project deliverables or technical reports.

Examples

Here are some screenshots to give you an idea of what the HTML output of VocDoc looks like. All are excerpts from a Web page created for the Semantic Web Conference vocabulary (SWC), which was generated directly from the vocabulary source file.

VocDoc HTML output preamble
The top of the vocabulary specification document, including metadata such as version, change dates, authors, licensing information, etc.

VocDoc term overview
VocDoc creates two kinds of term overviews: a general overview divided by classes and properties, and an overview divided into sections according to broad topics.

VocDoc class details
An example of the documentation for an individual class generated by VocDoc. Formal definitions such as super- and sub-classes, union-of, intersection-of, etc. are given. In addition, human-readable documentation is included, which can consist of arbitrary HTML code. At the bottom, each term definition includes a link to a SW index showing usage of this term.

Download

If you want to try VocDoc, you can get the source from SVN. Please note that VocDoc requires Ruby, as well as Redland and the Redland language bindings for Ruby.

Documentation

The documentation for VocDoc is included in the source code. You can also look at it online.