A Highly Literate Approach to Ontology Building

Ontologies present an attractive technology for describing bio-medicine, because they can be shared, and have rich computational properties. However, they lack the rich expressivity of English and fit poorly with the current scientific “publish or perish” model. While, there have been attempts to combine free text and ontologies, most of these perform post-hoc annotation of text. In this paper, we introduce our new environment which borrows from literate programming, to allow an author to co-develop both text and ontological description. We are currently using this environment to document the Karyotype Ontology which allows rich descriptions of the chromosomal complement in humans. We explore some of the advantages and difficulties of this form of ontology development.