ONTO-PERL: An API for supporting the development and analysis of bio-ontologies

MOTIVATION Many biomedical ontologies use OBO or OWL as knowledge representation language. The rapid increase of such ontologies calls for adequate tools to facilitate their use. In particular, there is a pressing need to programmatically deal with such ontologies in many applications, including data integration, text mining, as well as semantic applications supporting translational research. RESULTS We present an Application Programming Interface (API) called ONTO-PERL. This API significantly extends the repertoire of available tools supporting the development and analysis of bio-ontologies. AVAILABILITY The source code code as well as sample usage scripts can be found at: http://search.cpan.org/dist/ONTO-PERL/