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Ontologies and .owl files as data sources?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hey everyone,

Hope everyone's weekend is off to a good start.

I'm new to this, but I'd like to use .owl files (ontologies) as data sources so I can build apps that sit on top of them for end-users. Can anyone give me some advice on how to connect to the .owl files?

Publicly available (free) .owl files are on ontobee.org if anyone's kind enough to bat one around for me for a minute.

...and happy Saturday 🙂

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Building Power Apps

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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Unfortunately, Power App's support for XML such as .owl files is non-existent at this point. However, a great thing to vote up on the ideas forum: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/idb-p/PowerAppsIdeas
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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I can export to CSV in Excel and then get at it that way though, right?
BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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@Anonymous wrote:
I can export to CSV in Excel and then get at it that way though, right?
It's not as straightforward as you might like. The Excel connector available to Power Apps expects data to be organized into a table, not at all like a .owl file. You could read a file in as a string and parse it, but that's a complicated process too.

Power Apps might not be the right tool for dealing with ontologies. In order to support a user-level, low-code experience, many features (especially ones that allow dynamic handling of schema) you might see in various JavaScript frameworks/libraries are not available in Power Apps. This is mostly to make the service easier to learn and suitable for non-developers.