The BioTop Family of Upper Level Ontological Resources for Biomedicine

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017:235:441-445.

Abstract

BioTop is a domain upper level ontology for the life sciences, based on OWL DL, introduced ten years ago. This paper provides an update of the current state of this resource, with a special focus on BioTop's top level, BioTopLite, which currently contains 55 classes, 37 object properties and 247 description logics axioms. A bridging file allows harmonising BioTopLite with the classes of Basic Formal Ontology BFO2. The updated OWL resources are available at http://purl.org/biotop. They build the core of several upper level ontological artefacts including bridging ontologies to other upper level resources.

Keywords: Description Logics; Semantic Interoperability; Upper-level Ontology.

MeSH terms

  • Biological Ontologies*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval*
  • Software*