Aber-OWL: a framework for ontology-based data access in biology
This addresses the problem of computational access to large-scale biological ontologies for researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ontology and reasoning technologies.
The authors tackled the challenge of accessing formalized biological knowledge in ontologies by developing Aber-OWL, a framework that provides reasoning services, enabling ontology-based semantic access to biological data and literature.
Many ontologies have been developed in biology and these ontologies increasingly contain large volumes of formalized knowledge commonly expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Computational access to the knowledge contained within these ontologies relies on the use of automated reasoning. We have developed the Aber-OWL infrastructure that provides reasoning services for bio-ontologies. Aber-OWL consists of an ontology repository, a set of web services and web interfaces that enable ontology-based semantic access to biological data and literature. Aber-OWL is freely available at http://aber-owl.net.