Mapping between the OBO and OWL ontology languages

Journal Article · Mon Mar 07 00:00:00 EST 2011 · Journal of Biomedical Semantics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-1480-2-S1-S3· OSTI ID:1629609

Tirmizi, Syed ^[1]; Aitken, Stuart ^[2]; Moreira, Dilvan A. ^[3]; Mungall, Chris ^[4]; Sequeda, Juan ^[1]; Shah, Nigam H. ^[5]; Miranker, Daniel P. ^[6]

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1. Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States). Dept. of Computer Science
2. Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom). Artificial Intelligence Applications Inst.; Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom). Informatics Life-Sciences Inst.
3. Univ. of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Dept. of Computer Science, Mathematics and Computing Inst.
4. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
5. Stanford Univ., CA (United States). School of Medicine. Center for Biomedical Informatics Research
6. Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States). Dept. of Computer Science; Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States). Inst. for Cell and Molecular Biology

Background: Ontologies are commonly used in biomedicine to organize concepts to describe domains such as anatomies, environments, experiment, taxonomies etc. NCBO BioPortal currently hosts about 180 different biomedical ontologies. These ontologies have been mainly expressed in either the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) format or the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OBO emerged from the Gene Ontology, and supports most of the biomedical ontology content. In comparison, OWL is a Semantic Web language, and is supported by the World Wide Web consortium together with integral query languages, rule languages and distributed infrastructure for information interchange. These features are highly desirable for the OBO content as well. A convenient method for leveraging these features for OBO ontologies is by transforming OBO ontologies to OWL. Results: We have developed a methodology for translating OBO ontologies to OWL using the organization of the Semantic Web itself to guide the work. The approach reveals that the constructs of OBO can be grouped together to form a similar layer cake. Thus we were able to decompose the problem into two parts. Most OBO constructs have easy and obvious equivalence to a construct in OWL. A small subset of OBO constructs requires deeper consideration. We have defined transformations for all constructs in an effort to foster a standard common mapping between OBO and OWL. Our mapping produces OWL-DL, a Description Logics based subset of OWL with desirable computational properties for efficiency and correctness. Our Java implementation of the mapping is part of the official Gene Ontology project source. Conclusions: Our transformation system provides a lossless roundtrip mapping for OBO ontologies, i.e. an OBO ontology may be translated to OWL and back without loss of knowledge. In addition, it provides a roadmap for bridging the gap between the two ontology languages in order to enable the use of ontology content in a language independent manner.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Biological Systems Science Division; National Science Foundation (NSF); National Institutes of Health (NIH); Biological Sciences Research Council; CAPES-Brazil
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; IIS-0531767; U54 HG004028-01
• OSTI ID: 1629609
• Journal Information: Journal of Biomedical Semantics, Vol. 2, Issue Suppl 1; ISSN 2041-1480
• Publisher: BioMed Central
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES