Transforming the Axiomisation of Ontologies: The Ontology Pre-Processor Language

Abstract

As ontologies are developed there is a common need to transform them, especially from those that are axiomatically lean to those that are axiomatically rich. Such transformations often require large numbers of axioms to be generated that affect many different parts of the ontology. This paper describes the Ontology Pre-Processor Language (OPPL), a domain-specific macro language, based in the Manchester OWL Syntax, for manipulating ontologies written in OWL. OPPL instructions can add/remove entities, and add/remove axioms (semantics or annotations) to/from entities in an OWL ontology. OPPL is suitable for applying the same change to different ontologies or at different development stages, and for keeping track of the changes made (e.g. in pipelines). It is also suitable for defining independent modelling macros (e.g. Ontology Design Patterns) that can be applied at will and systematically across an ontology. The presented OPPL Instruction Manager is a Java library that processes OPPL instructions making the changes to an OWL ontology. A reference implementation that uses the OPPL Instruction Manager is also presented. The use of OPPL has been demonstrated in the Cell Cycle Ontolog