LexOWL: A Bridge between LexGrid and OWL

The Lexical Grid project is an on-going communitydriven initiative, coordinated by the Mayo Clinic Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, that provides a common terminology model to represent multiple vocabu­ lary and ontology sources as well as a scalable and ro­ bust API for accessing such information. In order to add more powerful functionalities (e.g., inferencing, editing) to the existing infrastructure and align LexGrid more closely with various Semantic Web technologies, we introduce the LexOWL project for representing the ontologies modeled within the LexGrid environment in OWL (Web Ontology Language). The crux of this effort is to create a “bridge” that functionally connects the LexBIG (an interface that im­ plements the LexGrid model) and OWL APIs (an interface that implements OWL) seamlessly. In this paper, we discuss the key aspects of designing and implementing the LexOWL bridge. We compared LexOWL with other OWL converting tools and conclude that LexOWL provides an OWL map­ ping and converting tool with well-defined interoperability for information in the biomedical domain.