The Semantic Web takes Wing: Programming Ontologies with Tawny-OWL

TL;DR

The paper introduces Tawny-OWL, a Clojure-based library that enables programmatic ontology development, offering extensibility, modern tooling, and potential improvements in the ontology creation process.

Contribution

It presents a novel fully-programmatic environment for ontology building using Tawny-OWL, integrating modern software development tools and techniques.

Findings

Provides a flexible, extensible environment for ontology development

Integrates with modern versioning and CI tools

Enhances the ontology creation process through programming paradigms

Abstract

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.