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Scowl: a Scala DSL for programming with the OWL API |
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17 May 2016 |
paper.bib |
Scowl is a domain-specific language (DSL) which provides a convenient Scala-based syntax for composing OWL (Web Ontology Language, [@OWL2009]) expressions and axioms. Effective use of complex, community developed ontologies within research applications, such as those from the OBO library (Open Biomedical Ontologies, [@Smith2007]), often requires custom programmatic manipulation of ontologies and data, along with input to and output from automated reasoners. Allowing deeply nested OWL constructs to be coded in a readable, declarative style, Scowl facilitates use cases at the interface of application programming and OWL modeling: 1) tabular data ingest and transformation into OWL; 2) ontology manipulation via programmatic generation of axioms from existing content; and 3) reporting on ontology content using pattern matching on OWL objects.
Within Scala applications, Scowl adds extension methods to native Java OWL API objects [@OWLAPI], supporting two syntax styles: the pseudo-English Manchester syntax [@Horridge2009], as well as the OWL Functional syntax [@Motik2009]. Integration with the standard Java OWL API provides compatibility with multiple freely available OWL reasoners.