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Tutorial 1: Writing Ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

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Georgina Moulton and Robert Stevens

The aims of this tutorial are to:

  • understand the use of ontologies
  • understand statements written in OWL
  • understand the role of automatic reasoning in ontology building
  • build an ontology and use a reasoner to draw inferences based on that ontology
  • gain experience in the Protégé 4 ontology building environment
  • gain insight into how OWL can play a role in semantic metadata

This one-day tutorial is based on Manchester's well-known "Pizza tutorial" (see http://www.co-ode.org). This tutorial will cover the main conceptual parts of OWL through the hands-on building of an ontology of pizzas and their ingredients. A series of exercises take attendees through the process of conceptualising the toppings found on a pizza; the entry of this classification into the Protégé environment; the description of many types of pizza. All this is set in the context of using automatic reasoning to check the consistency of the growing ontology and to use the reasoner to make queries about pizzas. The hands-on tutorial is topped and tailed with talks and discussion about ontology and the process of ontology building. Since 2003 this tutorial, in various forms, has been given over 20 times and been attended by hundreds of budding ontologists.

  • Ontologies from the OWL perspective: Explicit semantics for automatic reasoning
  • Building a classification: types of pizza topping
  • Using a reasoner: What is wrong with my ontology?
  • Restrictions in OWL: Pizzas have toppings;
  • Defined classes in OWL: the "cheesy Pizza";
  • The open world and Boolean expressions: The "vegetarian Pizza".
  • The wider ontology building process.

Dr. Georgina Moulton is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Northwest Institute of BioHealth Informatics (NIBHI). She develops and presents training and Continued Professional Development courses to national and international researchers from a range of disciplines. Georgina has a background in Bioinformatics and Biochemistry.

Dr. Robert Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in the BioHealth Informatics group in the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester. His main research areas are in the development and use of description logic ontologies to facilitate the analysis of biological data. Robert has a background in Bioinformatics, Computer Science and Biology.

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