Documentation

Arspec is a viewer and editor for RDF ontologies. These pages explain how to open a file, work with the built-in views, make views of your own, and let an AI assistant help. None of it requires programming, with one exception: the Styles page is for people who want to change how views are drawn, and it assumes some comfort with markup.

Getting started

Open a file, find your way around, edit in place, and save. Start here.

Perspectives

What a view is made of, the views that come with the app, and how to make and share your own.

Actions

What can be done to a view’s rows from the menu, the action bar and the keys, and how a view gets actions of its own.

Styles

For power users: changing how a view is laid out and drawn, with stylesheets that work a little like CSS.

AI assistant

The built-in assistant, and how to connect Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or another chat app.

FAQ

Formats, saving in the browser, where your data goes, and what Arspec is not.

Try it first

The whole editor runs in a browser at run.arspec.app. The demo opens with a small file about a team already loaded and three views made for it — People, Projects, Who knows whom. Pick a tab, press Configure (the sliders at the top right), and you will see what a view is made of. Or open an ontology of your own, from your disk or by its URL; a link can carry the file: run.arspec.app/?f=www.w3.org/TR/rdf12-turtle/examples/example1.ttl opens with the W3C's first Turtle example already loaded.

A few words you will meet

Word	What it means in Arspec
Source	A file you have opened: an ontology, a vocabulary, any RDF document. Opened from disk or from a URL.
Topic	A group of sources that belong together, plus the views that apply to them. Saved as a small `.arspec` file.
Perspective	A view: which items to list, what to show about each, and how things are nested. Each tab above a file is one perspective.
Lens	A perspective about a single item. Click an item and its lenses show what the file says about it.
Service perspective	A lens that belongs to one perspective and runs only inside it. Not listed with the file's views; edited through the view that owns it.
Term	Anything that can stand in a statement: a named thing, a relation, or a value such as text or a number.
Stylesheet	Rules for how a view is drawn: how it looks, not what it does. The app ships with one that covers most needs; power users can add their own.

For power users: the vocabularies

Perspectives and stylesheets are themselves RDF documents, so they can be read, written and version-controlled like any other. They use two small vocabularies, each published as an ontology at its own address:

Prefix	IRI	What it describes
`ars:`	`https://arspec.org/ars/spec/1/schema#`	Perspectives: their lists, conditions, what they display, and their defaults.
`av:`	`https://arspec.org/ars/spec/1/schema/view#`	Stylesheets: styles, what they apply to, layout and content.

Both ontologies ship inside the app. Preferences → Profile → Your perspectives and styles can open them, and the Prefixes tab of any file lists every prefix the file uses.