I've been reading about semantic web technologies such as RDF and OWL, and am intrigued about the possibilities of building an RDF / triple-store semantic database on top of my existing relational DBs. It's simply an R&D exercise, to see what I can do.
I like the look of OWLIM, but some basics are failing me. How exactly is one meant to build and then use an OWL ontology? Do you build it with something like Protege, then import it into your repository? Or is the ontology a byproduct of the software you develop to communicate with the repo?
It's a newbie question, but I'm just not sure where OWL fits into the grand order of things... I wouldn't ask the question if I hadn't looked around for guidance.