Building DAML+OIL Ontologies

This page provides pointers to material that help you go from ontology principles to practice using DAML+OIL. It is designed to provide some answers to the common question: I want to build an ontology of x using DAML+OIL. Where do I start? This site is not intended to give a comprehensive coverage of the specification of DAML+OIL, which is covered at the main DAML+OIL website.

General Information on building ontologies

Certain principles of ontological engineering are independent of the language used to implement them.

Tutorials

N. Noy and D. L. McGuinness. Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology
A. Maedche and S. Staab. Tutorials on Ontologies from AIFB.

Papers

M. Uschold and M. Gruninger. Ontologies: Principles, methods and applications. Knowledge Engineering Review, 11(2), 1996. Also available as AIAI-TR-191 from AIAI, The University of Edinburgh.
M. Uschold & R. Jasper. A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications
M FernÁndez, A Gomez-Perez, N Juristo. METHONTOLOGY: From Ontological Art Towards Ontological Engineering Workshop on Ontological Engineering. Spring Symposium Series. AAAI97 Stanford, USA.
D. L. McGuinness. "Ontologies Come of Age". In Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, editors. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential. MIT Press, 2002.
D. L. McGuinness. "Description Logics Emerge from Ivory Towers". Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-08 2001. In the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Description Logics. Stanford, CA, August 2001.

Presentations

D. L. McGuinness. Ontologies: What they are; Why you should care;What you should know. Invited talk for Defense briefing series entitled The Semantic Web and the Military. Presented June 5, 2001 and February 16, 2001.

Information on building ontologies for the web

Several courses and tutorials cover the principles of ontologies and their construction from the contrasting viewpoints of the Semantic Web and the Semantic Grid

Semantic Web Courses

Web Based Knowledge Representation Course, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In particular the 2nd lecture is on ontologies in general, with slides by Marta Sabou.
Course on the Semantic Web, organised by Prof Jeff Heflin at Lehigh University.

Semantic Web Presentations

Ontologies and the Semantic Web by Prof. Richard Fikes, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University.

Semantic Web Portals

The OntoWeb Network provides a portal for the benefit of the semantic web community.

Semantic Grid Presentations

Carole Goble's Ontology Tutorial based on that presented at Global Grid Forum 5, Edinburgh, 2002.
Background material from Carole Goble.
Other Semantic grid based presentations

Description logic based ontologies

Description logic ontologies differ in their approach to construction. Rather than manually create a hierarchy and then assign properties to concepts, the process is turned on its head. Each concept is assigned a logic definition which is then used to derive a classification. There is more than one way to classify a set of concepts. This approach allows different classifications to be produced for different purposes based on the same underlying terminological knowledge.

Description logic based ontologies can be useful because they provide:

Scalability. The reasoner can be used to maintain hierarchies and detect logical inconsistencies in concept descriptions.
Extendability. Description logics provide a formal semantic grammar with which complex concepts can be built from simpler building blocks. The initial authors of the ontology now only have to provide the building blocks, and constraints on how they can be composed. Specific concepts can be formed at the point of use.
Explicitness. Requiring formal concept definitions forces authors to be much more explicit and precise about their intended meaning for a concept. This can aid interpretation both by other humans and machines.

Detailed information on description logics can be found at the Description Logics Home Page.

Information on the use of description logics to support the semantic web can be found on Jeff Z. Pan's pages

Sean Bechhofer and Ian Horrocks have produced a document describing OWL as part of the WonderWeb project. This also contains a short tutorial introduction to the language.

Building DAML+OIL Ontologies to take advantage of description logic reasoning

Tutorials

Angus Roberts has written a tutorial on how to use OilEd to create simple DAML+OIL ontologies.
Alan Rector has written a tutorial on creating biomedical ontologies in DAML+OIL using OilEd.

Ontologies

The DAML site maintains a library of DAML+OIL ontologies.
Within Manchester we are working on two domains
- web service ontologies for bioinformatics(current prototype version available here).
- Gene Ontology in DAML+OIL. The syntactic transformation from GO RDF to DAML+OIL is available here.

Projects

GONG: Gene Ontology Next Generation. A DAML+OIL based project to provide a more explicit conceptualisation of the Gene Ontology.
GOAT: Gene Ontology Annotation Tool. A DAML+OIL based project to provide more flexible tools to annotate bioinformatics data.
CLEF: Clinical eScience Framework. Investigating the use of DAML+OIL for medical applications.
COHSE: The Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service Project. The project uses a DAML+OIL based ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of WWW document terms and their relationships.
myGRID: Bioinformatics grid project. Uses DAML+OIL ontologies to conceptually describe services and so facilitate their discovery.

People in Manchester who are using or developing DAML+OIL.

Ian Horrocks: Primary research interest is Knowledge Representation; in particular ontologies and ontology languages, tableaux algorithms for Description Logics (DLs), optimisation techniques for such algorithms, and the application of all of the above to the Semantic Web
Robert Stevens: Working on the use of ontologies and the reconciliation of semantic heterogeneity within bioinformatics resources. Principle Investigator of the GOAT project, also involved in the GONG and myGRID projects
Sean Bechhofer: Developer of OilEd and its successors. Involved in the COHSE, OntoWeb and WonderWeb projects.
Carole Goble: Principle investigator of the myGRID project.
Alan Rector: Principle Investigator of the CLEF project.
Jeff Z. Pan: Jeff's primary research interest is Description Logics Support for the Semantic Web.
Chris Wroe: Working on GONG, GOAT and myGRID projects.
Angus Roberts: Now at Sheffield University conducting research on the use of DAML+OIL ontologies for natural language processing