cogs 2.0.791

Convention-based Ontology Generation System

The Convention-based Ontology Generation System (COGS) gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build ontologies that enables a clean separation of concerns and gives you full control over markup for enjoyable, agile development. COGS includes many features that enable fast, Test Driven Development for publishing sophisticated models in a variety of formats.

COGS is for domain experts and groups who value ease of collaboration and low technical barriers for participation.

Highlighted projects using COGS

• SDTL - Structured Data Transformation Language
  • https://github.com/ddialliance/sdtl [cogs]
  • https://ddialliance.org/sdtl
• DDI Lifecycle 4.0
  • https://github.com/ddialliance/ddimodel [cogs]
  • https://ddialliance.org/ddi-lifecycle

Output formats

JSON, XML, and RDF/JSON-LD are first-class authoritative COGS serialization families. OWL describes the RDF ontology; Turtle and JSON-LD encode RDF graphs. The authoritative COGS outputs are:

• XML Schema 1.0 and JSON Schema 2020-12
• OWL ontology in W3C Turtle and JSON-LD
• JSON-LD context for RDF instances
• SHACL Core/SPARQL shapes for closed RDF instance validation
• UML/XMI in normative and EA flavors
• C# class library with JSON, XML, and RDF graph serialization
• Python class package with JSON and XML serialization
• TypeScript class package with JSON and XML serialization

The RDF publisher (publish-rdf, with publish-owl as an alias) writes <slug>.ttl, the equivalent complete ontology <slug>.ontology.jsonld, the lightweight instance context <slug>.context.jsonld, production SHACL shapes <slug>.shacl.ttl, and the experimental native SHACL 1.2 companion <slug>.shacl12.ttl. SHACL complements OWL with closed instance constraints, including subtype, identity, and ordered-list checks. The ontology JSON-LD embeds its own context and exposes classes, descriptions, inheritance, restrictions, facets, and keys without requiring remote documents. Ordered RDF properties retain direct membership triples and a companion <camelCaseName>List collection preserving order and duplicates. The context is not a mapping of the ordinary COGS JSON container and does not add a JSON-LD instance writer or RDF importer. OWL's documented exceptions and validation boundaries remain explicit.

COGS also publishes the projections LinkML, DCTAP, GraphQL schema language, Graphviz/DOT, and Sphinx documentation. ShEx is not a built-in output; it can be generated via LinkML.

Platform

COGS runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS on .NET 10.

• https://www.microsoft.com/net/core/

Documentation

Quick starts, Modelers Guide, and technical documentation is available.

• http://cogsdata.org/docs

Installation and download

COGS can be installed as a dotnet global tool from nuget

dotnet tool install -g cogs

Legal and Licensing

COGS is licensed under the MIT license.

Logo

<p align="center"><img src="http://cogsdata.org/img/cogs-logo-800.png" alt="cogs"/></p>