The NCBO OBOF to OWL Mapping

Two of the most significant formats for biomedical ontologies are the Open Biomedical Ontologies Format (OBOF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). To make it possible to translate ontologies between these two representation formats, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) has developed a mapping between the OBOF and OWL formats as well as inter-conversion software. The goal was to allow the sharing of tools, ontologies, and associated data between the OBOF and Semantic Web communities.

OBOF does not have a formal grammar, so the NCBO had to capture its intended semantics to map it to OWL.

This official NCBO mapping was used to make all OBO Foundry ontologies available in OWL. 

Availability: This mapping functionality can be embedded into OBO-Edit and Protégé-OWL ontology editors. This software is available at: http://bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/OboInOwl:Main_Pag

OntolAD: a Formal Ontology for Architectural Descriptions

International audienc

SWI: A Semantic Web Interactive Gazetteer to support Linked Open Data

Current implementations of gazetteers, geographic directories that associate place names to geographic coordinates, cannot use semantics to answer complex queries (most gazetteers are just thesauri of place names), use domain ontologies for place name disambiguation, make their data sets available in the Semantic Web or support the use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). A new generation of gazetteers has to tackle these problems. In this paper, we present a new architecture for gazetteers that uses VGI and Semantic Web tools, such as ontologies and Linked Open Data to overcome these limitations. We also present a gazetteer, the Semantic Web Interactive Gazetteer (SWI), implemented using this architecture, and show that it can be used to add absent geographic coordinates to biodiversity records. In our tests, we use this gazetteer to correct geographic data from a big sample (around 142,000 occurrence records of Amazonian specimens) from SpeciesLink, a big repository of biodiversity collection records from Brazil. The tests showed that the SWI Gazetteer was able to add geographic coordinates to around 30,000 records, increasing the records with coordinates from 30.29% to 57.5% of the total number of records in the sample (representing an increase of 90%). © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved