Building a Reason-able Bioinformatics Ontology Using OIL

Robert Stevens, Ian Horrocks, Carole A. Goble, Sean Bechhofer

Abstract: Ontologies will play an important role in bioinformatics, as they do in other disciplines, where they will provide a source of precisely defined terms that can be communicated across people and applications. The Ontology Inference Layer (OIL), is an ontology language that has an easy to use frame feel, yet at the same time allows users to exploit the full power of an expressive description logic. OilEd, an editor for OIL, uses reasoning to support ontology design, facilitating the development of ontologies that are both more detailed and more accurate. This paper presents a bioinformatics ontology building case study using OilEd to highlight the features of the combination of a frame representation and an expressive description logic.