Ontology Playground

Ontology Playground is a free, open-source web application built by Microsoft for learning about ontologies and Microsoft Fabric IQ. It runs entirely as a static site with zero backend dependencies, deployable to Azure Static Web Apps or GitHub Pages. The project was developed with AI-assisted coding and is licensed under the MIT License.

What It Is

Ontology Playground sits at the intersection of knowledge graph tooling and educational software. It lets users explore, design, and export ontologies — structured representations of entities and their relationships — in a visual, browser-based environment. The tool is specifically oriented around the RDF/OWL format that Microsoft Fabric IQ expects, making it a companion learning and prototyping tool for that platform.

Core Features

The application ships with a rich set of capabilities organized around exploration, creation, and learning:

• Interactive Graph Exploration — Cytoscape.js-powered diagrams with pan, zoom, node inspection, and live search, using the fcose layout algorithm.
• Ontology Catalogue — A curated library spanning six domains (Retail, E-Commerce, Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Education) with shareable deep links per ontology.
• Visual Ontology Designer — A full-screen split-pane editor with undo/redo (50 levels), real-time validation, live graph preview, and export to RDF/XML or JSON.
• RDF Import & Export — Full round-trip support for RDF/XML (OWL classes, datatype properties, object properties with cardinalities), compatible with .rdf and .owl files.
• Embeddable Widget — A self-contained ontology-embed.js file that renders an interactive ontology viewer on any web page with a single <script> tag, supporting dark/light themes.
• One-Click Catalogue PR — GitHub device-flow sign-in lets users fork the repo, commit RDF + metadata, and open a pull request directly from the designer.

Ontology School and Learning System

A structured learning hub at /#/learn provides 9 courses covering conceptual paths and hands-on labs. Content includes an Ontology Fundamentals track (6 articles from "What is an Ontology?" through RDF/OWL and Fabric IQ), seven domain learning paths (Retail, E-Commerce, Finance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, University, HR System), and a hands-on IQ Lab that builds a 15-entity retail supply chain ontology across 7 steps. Every article supports presentation mode (slides split at ## headings) and includes interactive quizzes with instant feedback.

A Quest System offers five progressive quests with multi-step instructions, hints, progress bars, and achievement badges. A Natural Language Query Playground lets users type questions like "Which customers placed orders?" and see how they map to ontology entities — previewing Fabric IQ's NL2Ontology capability.

Architecture and Deployment

The app is built with React 19, TypeScript 5, Vite, Zustand for state management, Framer Motion for animations, and Cytoscape.js for graph rendering. It is fully static — no server required at runtime. Two deployment paths are supported out of the box via GitHub Actions:

• Azure Static Web Apps — primary deployment target, with automatic PR preview environments.
• GitHub Pages — ideal for forks, with automatic VITE_BASE_PATH configuration.

An optional Azure Functions backend can be enabled via the VITE_ENABLE_AI_BUILDER environment variable to power an Azure OpenAI-based ontology builder.

AI Agent Integration

The repository includes GitHub Copilot customization files (skills, instructions, and reusable prompts) so AI agents can reliably import customer RDF/OWL into catalogue-ready format, generate progressive Ontology School modules, and route lesson content through human review workflows. Included skills cover ontology catalog import, school path generation, community ontology contribution, and name generation for demos and tests.

Current Status

The project is in Preview as of its README. The GitHub repository under the microsoft organization was created in February 2026 and last updated in July 2026, with 1,209 stars and 193 forks reported by the repository metadata. The live application is hosted at microsoft.github.io/Ontology-Playground.