Submitting an ontology

(Need update: imported from AgroPortal project management Wiki on 2022-11-17)

Ontology upload generic workflow


For each resource in AgroPortal, two objects are created:

  • Ontology: it is a semantic object that corresponds to the skeleton (or stub) for an ontology hosted on AgroPortal; it contains only a few metadata (e.g., name, acronym, group, etc.) about an ontology. For more details about the ontology object: http://data.agroportal.lirmm.fr/documentation#Ontology

  • Submission: it is a semantic object that corresponds to the concrete version of an ontology hosted on AgroPortal; it contains most of the ontology metadata (version, description, homepage, publication, etc.). For one Ontology, there could be several Submissions. For more information about the submission object: http://data.agroportal.lirmm.fr/documentation#OntologySubmission

Ontology and submission creation

To create a new ontology within AgroPortal, first, select the “browse” option of the main menu. Then, click on the button “submit new ontology”. Next, insert information about your ontology (e.g. name, acronym, administrator, etc). It is important to know that an ontology could be defined as a “private” or “public” resource. If the created ontology is private then it will not be visible for AgroPortal users, but only for its administrators. Else, all AgroPortal users will be able to see it. After providing basic information about your ontology, validate your editing to create an ontology object.

To accomplish the creation process, provide more detailed metadata (e.g., format, license, etc.) about your current ontology in the “information submission” web page. By doing this, you associate a submission object that contains ontology metadata to your ontology object. We strongly recommend checking metadata values after the parsing of the ontology (i.e., a few hours later). When the ontology is parsed, AgroPortal automatically detects the list of its original metadata (i.e., from the loading source) and complete missing ones.

To have more information about the defined properties of our metadata model, go to http://data.agroportal.lirmm.fr/submission_metadata


Note that the administrator(s) of the created ontology automatically receive(s) notifications each time the metadata of the ontology are modified.

Before submitting an ontology into Agroportal, we recommend checking its syntax and opening it under an ontology editor, for example, Protégé editor. If you submit a non-consistent ontology into AgroPortal then its errors will be detected by the parser and an error message will be displayed when you try to explore the ontology content. Else, the status of the ontology will be “downloaded” and “parsed”.

It is strongly recommended to use the graphic interface for the creation and editing of an ontology or a submission (e.g. steps described above).

Edit/author metadata

To edit basic metadata of an existing ontology (new administrator for example), first, select the “browse” option from the main menu. Select your ontology and click on the icon “edit ontology information”.


To edit the current submission information (i.e, modification date, etc.), click on the icon “edit submission information”.

Create new submission

To download a new submission of the ontology, click on add submission and specify metadata about the new version.

Parse submission

Ontology-based services

Get metadata back

To export ontology metadata, click on the “get my data back” button on the right of the ontology “summary” web page.



Inconsequent, you could obtain all stored metadata within the portal in RDF/XML, JSON-LD or N-triples syntax. Copy/paste within the original ontology if you would enrich your ontology with more detailed metadata.

Special cases

Case of ontologies without English labels

In AgroPortal, we consider English as the main language (i.e., English labels are used to display content as well as being indexed for search, annotator and recommender services). Multilingual ontologies (i.e., with labels in multiple languages) are parsed, but only the English content is explicitly used. Non-English monolingual ontologies are attached as “views” of the main ontology that is solely described with metadata (no content). For instance, the French Agroecology Knowledge Management ontology is only described in http://agroportal.lirmm.fr/ontologies/GECO with metadata but has attached a specific view with the real content in French http://agroportal.lirmm.fr/ontologies/GECO-FR.