Abstract

AbstractAccurate representation of complex domains such as biology demands powerful and expressive ontology languages such as OWL. However, the complex nested class expressions required for modeling can be a hindrance to ontology authoring and adoption. These class expressions can appear opaque to domain experts, and even users proficient in OWL can benefit from some kind of syntactic sugar or "short-cut" strategy, especially when authoring large ontologies.One solution is to have domain experts fill in simple templates (for example, in Excel) and translate the results into more complex axioms, but this has the disadvantage of being disconnected from full ontology authoring and reasoning environment.We present here a method of specifying shortcut properties directly in OWL. These shortcut properties can be used in similar ways as object properties within the OWL environment, with the resulting simple axioms translated automatically to more complex axioms via macro expansion. We describe some example scenarios where this is of use in authoring existing bio-ontologies.One of the main implications of this work is a way to simplify the translation between OBO format and OWL, and the use of RDF triple-stores with complex OWL ontologies.

Highlights

  • Accurate representation of complex domains such as biology demand powerful and expressive ontology languages such as OWL

  • The very expressive power of OWL can be a hindrance to widespread adoption and effective use domain experts may not be comfortable with complex axioms and deeply nested class expressions

  • Property chains are a powerful feature introduced into OWL2

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Summary

Introduction

The very expressive power of OWL can be a hindrance to widespread adoption and effective use domain experts may not be comfortable with complex axioms and deeply nested class expressions. Even those proficient in OWL may prefer to work in terms of high-level templates that abstract away from the logical “machine code” of OWL. A generic simple macro-expansion tool can be used to expand these shortcut relations into more complex axioms and class-expressions This has the advantage of allowing the intermediate representation to be viewed and manipulated from within standard OWL tools and environments

Macro Expansion Language
Macro Expansion of Annotation Properties
Macro Expansion of Object Properties
Implementation
Comparison with property chains
Practical usage and implementation: ontology views
Applications for OBO to OWL translation
Applications for RDF and semantic web applications
Comparison with other methods
Conclusions
Full Text
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