The Semantic Web takes Wing: Programming Ontologies with Tawny-OWL
This provides a more efficient and extensible environment for ontology developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing tools like Clojure and the OWL API.
The authors tackled the problem of ontology development by introducing Tawny-OWL, a library that recasts it as a form of programming, enabling the use of modern software engineering tools like versioning and testing.
The Tawny-OWL library provides a fully-programmatic environment for ontology building; it enables the use of a rich set of tools for ontology development, by recasting development as a form of programming. It is built in Clojure - a modern Lisp dialect, and is backed by the OWL API. Used simply, it has a similar syntax to OWL Manchester syntax, but it provides arbitrary extensibility and abstraction. It builds on existing facilities for Clojure, which provides a rich and modern programming tool chain, for versioning, distributed development, build, testing and continuous integration. In this paper, we describe the library, this environment and the its potential implications for the ontology development process.