Webulous and the Webulous Google Add-On - a web service and application for ontology building from templates

Abstract

BackgroundAuthoring bio-ontologies is a task that has traditionally been undertaken by skilled experts trained in understanding complex languages such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL), in tools designed for such experts. As requests for new terms are made, the need for expert ontologists represents a bottleneck in the development process. Furthermore, the ability to rigorously enforce ontology design patterns in large, collaboratively developed ontologies is difficult with existing ontology authoring software.DescriptionWe present Webulous, an application suite for supporting ontology creation by design patterns. Webulous provides infrastructure to specify templates for populating ontology design patterns that get transformed into OWL assertions in a target ontology. Webulous provides programmatic access to the template server and a client application has been developed for Google Sheets that allows templates to be loaded, populated and resubmitted to the Webulous server for processing.ConclusionsThe development and delivery of ontologies to the community requires software support that goes beyond the ontology editor. Building ontologies by design patterns and providing simple mechanisms for the addition of new content helps reduce the overall cost and effort required to develop an ontology. The Webulous system provides support for this process and is used as part of the development of several ontologies at the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Knowledge Representation and Management, It’s Time to Integrate!

“…The section editors achieved a first selection of 100 papers based on titles and abstracts. After a second review of this set of papers, a selection of 15 candidate best papers was established [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Five reviewers reviewed these pre-selected papers to select the best four final papers [6][7][8][9].…”

“…Jupp et al [16] presented a solution (Webulous) to OWL ontology development based on ontology design patterns. It is a Google add-on which is used for the development of few ontologies at the European Bioinformatics Institute.…”

Thematic issue of the Second combined Bio-ontologies and Phenotypes Workshop

“…Vita et al [2] directly propose an extension to a previously-proposed Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Restriction ontology called MaHCO [3], constructed with the assistance of ontology design patterns, while Jupp et al [4] introduce a web-based tool to ease authoring of ontologies with built-in support for enforcing precisely such design patterns.…”

“…In their software article, Jupp et al [4] introduce the Webulous application suite, including an add-on application for Google Sheets that allows population of ontology design templates with content, and demonstrate it with a case study using the Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO). This software allows addition of ontology content in bulk, while ensuring consistency of that content.…”

A Bootstrapping Method for Automatic Constructing of the Web Ontology Instances and Properties

“…Jupp et al [10] presented Webulous that is an application suite for supporting ontology creation by design patterns, and provided simple mechanisms for the addition of new content in order to reduce the overall cost and effort required to develop ontologies. Peng et al [11] proposed a method which can learn a heavy-weighted medical ontology based on medical glossaries and Web resources, in order to deal with heterogeneous knowledge in the medical field.…”