My Own Ontology Projects

Over the past few years I have been building a series of ontologies for fun and learning. Until recently, most of my ontology building has been vicarious as I’ve had no real means of building and looking at ontologies.

The last ontology that I’d actually built (until a year or so back), was using the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL). This forerunner of OWL had a nice human readable syntax; this style of syntax has now returned in the Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS). In fact, one of the original motivations for its development by Matt Horridge was to have something that I, as a blind person, could use.

For a few years I built ontologies using MOS, but having to give them to a sighted colleague to process and classify within Protege (which is not very accessible). Given that the reasoner should be used at the addition of almost every axiom, this process could be rather tedious. Anyway, Matt Horridge has now developed a little MOS based editor called Kudu and it has changed my ontology building life.

I have used this opportunity to build a series of ontologies that will test some modelling techniques; some OWL constructs or with some other goal in mind — usually one that stretches OWL in some way.

So,I will be describing these ontologies in a series of what will almost certainly be a set of very sporadic posts.