Balancing Expressivity and Implementability in OWL Ontologies for Semantic Data Frameworks: The Journey from 2004 to 2009 and Beyond

Fox, Peter

In 2004, a small team of investigators undertook a prototype development effort to explore how semantics could be inserted in several existing scientific data systems being supported by the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The problem to be solved was: discovery and access to interdisciplinary and heteroegeneous data sources without very detailed expert knowledge of the domain which included cryptic jargon (mnemonics). Ontology development expertise was included in the team but instead of a bottom-up or top-down approach to ontology development, we used a variant on the use case driven design to formalize vocabulary and relation requirements. We also had to use much of the existing infrastructures. Instead of a prototype the result was a production semantic data framework after about the first 9 months of the project. Several successive releases based on implemented use cases as well as an evaluation study led to some clear lessons in ontology development. In this talk I will present the setting for this development effort, describe the use cases, experience with the ontology and language encoding choices, including software tools. Since 2007, we have carried these developments to a wider range of disciplines and I will also relate these recent experiences and consequences for ontology development including current and future directions with ontology modularization and OWL-2.

Cite as: Fox, Peter (2009). Balancing Expressivity and Implementability in OWL Ontologies for Semantic Data Frameworks: The Journey from 2004 to 2009 and Beyond. In Proc. Australasian Ontology Workshop 2009 (AOW 2009) Melbourne, Australia. CRPIT, 112. Meyer, T. and Taylor, K. Eds., ACS. 3

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