Ontopoiesis¶

Ontopoiesis is the operator CLI of the Ontochoros stack. It builds an OWL/XML document into a Cypher-queryable Ontoplexis projection, then gives you the day-to-day workflows around that one artifact — query, lint, test, diff, impact analysis, rendering, and Cypher migrations:

ontopoiesis build pizza.owx -o pizza.lbug   # OWL/XML → projection
ontopoiesis lint pizza.lbug                 # structural quality checks
ontopoiesis test pizza.lbug tests/          # your own Cypher tests, via pytest
ontopoiesis diff before.lbug after.lbug     # what changed, per axiom
ontopoiesis export pizza.lbug               # projection → OWL/XML

Every command reads the same projection, so you parse the source ontology once and interrogate it as often as you like — locally or in CI. Quality gates are plain .cypher files that fail when they return rows, which means your team extends the rule set the way it writes dbt tests. On real ontologies the bundled baseline alone finds shipping defects; the case studies reproduce them command by command, and Why Ontochoros explains the approach.

Ontopoiesis parses OWL/XML only, matching Ontoplexis. Other serializations (Turtle, RDF/XML, functional syntax, OBO) are one robot convert or Protégé export away; classify with an external reasoner before building if you want inferred axioms in the graph.

Start with the Quickstart, then see the CLI reference and the projection model.