Using a vocabulary

Dereferencing

Ask for what you want with an Accept header. The namespace IRI answers with a 303 See Other pointing at the representation you asked for.

# Human-readable documentation
curl -L -H "Accept: text/html" https://epistemic-ontology.net/record

# Turtle (also: application/rdf+xml, application/ld+json, application/n-triples)
curl -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" https://epistemic-ontology.net/record

Use -L, or you will only see the redirect. A 303 is the correct status here rather than a 302: the namespace IRI names an ontology, not the document that describes it, and a 303 is exactly the way to say "the thing you asked about is not a document, but here is a document about it".

Hash namespaces

All vocabularies here use hash namespaces:

https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record#Inference
https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm#Destruction
https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/arith#Expression

The fragment never reaches the server. Dereferencing any single term therefore fetches the whole vocabulary document, and your client resolves the fragment locally. That is a deliberate trade: one round trip gets you every term, which is the right shape for vocabularies of this size.

Importing

The serializations are served with correct media types and Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, so browser-based RDF tooling and owl:imports-by-URL both work without a proxy.

@prefix owl:  <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rec:  <https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record#> .

<https://example.com/my-ontology>
    a owl:Ontology ;
    owl:imports <https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record> .

Note the import target has no trailing #: import the ontology IRI, not the namespace prefix.

Loading directly with rdflib:

from rdflib import Graph

g = Graph().parse("https://epistemic-ontology.net/record", format="turtle")
print(len(g), "triples")

Worked examples

Every worked example carries its own permanent namespace, formed systematically from its name:

@prefix ex: <https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record/examples/neptune-discovery#> .

These dereference the same way as the vocabularies. They are illustrations, not normative parts of any ontology — nothing imports them.

Canonical host and redirects

The canonical host is the apex, https://epistemic-ontology.net. Three other names (www, and both .org variants) permanently redirect to it, as does all plain HTTP.

The namespace IRIs were minted at www.epistemic-ontology.net, so they resolve through one permanent 301 to the apex and then the 303 negotiation. The minted form stays valid forever; that is what "permanent" has to mean.

Citing

Cite the namespace IRI, never a file path. The IRI is the identifier that is promised to keep resolving; file layout is an implementation detail and may change as serializations are added.

Version numbers shown on each ontology page are read directly out of the published Turtle's owl:versionInfo at build time, so a version quoted on this site is the version actually being served.

Licensing

Attribution for CC BY 4.0 material:

"The Record Ontology — epistemic-ontology.net" — https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record