SWAN Ontology v. 1.2 almost ready to go

In the last months, I've been busy in developing the new version of the ontology [SWAN Ontology] that represents the "backbone" of the SWAN project. In this iteration, I had two major goals in mind: modularity and provenance. The new ontology is composed by a set of modules, actually the SWAN ontology consists of a collection of ontologies. I think this is an important step for several reasons:

• first of all the SWAN ontology is growing in size. Modules can help in managing the increasing complexity
• modules can improve the learning process of people that want to approach our ontology for modeling scientific discourse or simply for reusing a part of it
• defining modules helped me in thinking a little bit more

The architecture of the SWAN ontology release candidate

As additional feature I was also thinking to provide sub-modules for increasing reuse without asking potential users to write their own subset of the SWAN ontology. Thus, for instance, the Agents ontology is split in different modules that can include or not provenance and/or collections. This is because I assume that not everybody wants to deal with the tedious ordered lists and not anybody needs to define provenance the level we need.

Provenance is one of the major aspects in the semantic web world that we are trying to build with SWAN. Our application is mashing up data coming from different sources and we would like to be able to export the new knowledge product giving credit to the original data provider and declaring which piece of software performed the conversion of such data into our format.

I will speak more in detail about provenance in my next post.

[SWAN Ontology] Ciccarese P, Wu E, Kinoshita J, Wong G, Ocana M, Ruttenberg A, Clark T. The SWAN Biomedical Discourse Ontology. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, in press. PMID: 18583197