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https://github.com/phillord/tawny-owl

Build OWL Ontologies in a Programmatic Environment
https://github.com/phillord/tawny-owl

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Build OWL Ontologies in a Programmatic Environment

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Tawny-OWL

===========



[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/phillord/tawny-owl.png?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/phillord/tawny-owl)



## Introduction



Tawny Logo



Tawny-OWL allows construction of OWL ontologies, in a evaluative, functional

and fully programmatic environment. Think of it as the ontology engineering

equivalent of [R](http://www.r-project.org/). It has many advantages over

traditional ontology engineering tools, also described in a

[video introduction](https://vimeo.com/89782389).



- An interactive shell or REPL to explore and create ontologies.

- Source code, with comments, editable using any of a range of IDEs.

- Fully extensible -- new syntaxes, new data sources can be added by users

- Patterns can be created for individual ontologies; related classes can be

  built easily, accurately and maintainably.

- A unit test framework with fully reasoning.

- A clean syntax for versioning with any VCS, integrated with the IDE

- Support for packaging, dependency resolution and publication

- Enabled continuous integration with both ontology and software dependencies



Tawny-OWL is implemented as a domain-specific language but built over a full

programming language called [Clojure](http://www.clojure.org). Many of the

features described (REPL, patterns, unit tests, extensibility) derive directly

from the Clojure language, or from general-purpose programming tools (IDEs,

versioning, continuous integration). The core ontology features are

implemented directly using the [OWL API](http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/).

These features are, therefore, industry strength, standards-compliant and

well-supported independently of the Tawny-OWL developers.



OWL is a W3C standard ontology representation language; an ontology is a fully

computable set of statements, describing the things and their relationships.

They are used, mostly notable in biomedicine, to describe complex areas of

knowledge such as [genetics](http://www.geneontology.org/) or

[clinical terminology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOMED_CT), but can

describe anything, including [e-commerce](http://purl.org/goodrelations/). For

more tutorial information, please see http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org.



A [full-length manual](https://phillord.github.io/take-wing/) is also

[available](http://github.com/phillord/take-wing). The original,

slightly older [getting started](docs/getting-started.md) document is

available.



## For the Clojure developer



Tawny-OWL is predominately designed as a programmatic application for ontology

development, but it can be used as an API. OWL ontologies are a set of

statements about things and their relationships; underneath these statements

map to a subset of first-order logic which makes it possible to answer 

questions about these statements using highly-optimised reasoners.



Currently, the use of ontologies as a tool within general-purpose programming

is relatively under-developed. Part of the intention behind Tawny-OWL is to

embed ontologies deeply within a programmatic framework, to see whether

ontologies are useful in this way.



Further information on the use of Tawny-OWL is available in the

[documentation](docs/tawny-as-an-api.md).



## Motivation



I discuss the development of this code base in my

[journal](http://www.russet.org.uk/blog). Two posts include one on the

[motivation](http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2214) and another on making

the library more ["lispy"](http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2254). All

revelevant posts are

[categorised](http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/category/all/professional/tech/tawny-owl).



## Installation



Tawny-OWL requires no installation *per se* and is used as any Clojure

library. It is available from

[clojars](https://clojars.org/uk.org.russet/tawny-owl), so just add:



`[uk.org.russet/tawny-owl]` to your `project.clj` file.



I use Leiningen 2 on the current version 16.04 Ubuntu and, occasionally, on

Windows. Editing of both tawny-owl and the ontologies using it, is with Emacs

25 using Clojure mode and nrepl, currently both installed from their

respective versioning systems. The library should not depend on this

environment, however.



## Author



Phillip Lord, Newcastle University.



http://www.russet.org.uk/blog



## Mailing List



There is a [mailing list](mailto:[email protected]).



## Version



[![Clojars Project](http://clojars.org/uk.org.russet/tawny-owl/latest-version.svg)](http://clojars.org/uk.org.russet/tawny-owl)



## License



The contents of this file are subject to the LGPL License, Version 3.0.



Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, Newcastle University



This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under

the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free

Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any

later version.



This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT

ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS

FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.



You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along

with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.