The OBO to OWL Mapping, GO to OWL 1.1!

A large library of biomedical ontologies has been developed in the OBO format, including important ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). These resources have the potential to contribute to the Semantic Web in the life sciences domain. In particular, they allow the annotation of distributed experimental data in using a controlled and shared vocabulary. As the Web Ontology Language OWL is the W3C recommended standard for ontologies, converting OBO ontologies to OWL becomes an important need: it will facilitate the sharing and reuse of this important resource and make the expanding range of OWL tools available for use with OBO ontologies. In order to achieve this, we propose a formalisation of the OBO syntax in terms of a BNF style grammar, and a formalisation of the semantics of (a large part of) OBO in terms of a mapping to OWL 1.1. This demonstrates that the OWL 1.1 extension of OWL allows nearly all of the OBO language to be captured.