Abstract

Abstract. This paper reports our experience with OWL for the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). We show that converting the FMA from Protégé into OWL DL was possible, with most features of the original FMA captured. The conversion relies on translation and enrichment rules, implemented with flexible options. Unsurprisingly, reasoning with OWL proved to be a real challenge, due to the sheer size and complexity of the FMA. As the entire FMA in OWL DL raised inference problems hard to solve in terms of time and memory, an incremental approach was adopted. A number of various smaller versions that Racer could handle were successfully tested. Some inconsistencies were identified and some classes reclassified. The analysis of the results obtained so far shows the benefits of representing the FMA in OWL and, more generally, the usefulness of DLs reasoning techniques for large-scale biomedical ontologies shared on the Web. 1

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