SPARQL2OWL: Towards Bridging the Semantic Gap Between RDF and OWL

Year: 2016

Venue: Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Biological Ontology and BioCreative, Corvallis, Oregon, United States, August 1-4, 2016.

Authors: Mona Alshahrani, Hussein Almashouq, Robert Hoehndorf

Abstract

Several large databases in biology are now making theirinformation available through the Resource Description Framework(RDF). RDF can be used for large datasets and provides agraph-based semantics. The Web Ontology Language (OWL),another Semantic Web standard, provides a more formal, model-theoretic semantics. While some approaches combine RDF andOWL, for example for querying, knowledge in RDF and OWLis often expressed differently. Here, we propose a method togenerate OWL ontologies from SPARQL queries usingn-aryrelational patterns. Combined with background knowledge fromontologies, the generated OWL ontologies can be used for expressivequeries and quality control of RDF data. We implement ourmethod in a a prototype tool available athttps://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/SPARQL2OWL