I am pleased to announce the release of tawny-owl, Version 0.12.

This package allows users to construct OWL ontologies in a fully programmatic environment, namely Clojure. This means the user can take advantage of programmatic language to automate and abstract the ontology over the development process; also, rather than requiring the creation of ontology specific development environments, a normal programming IDE can be used; finally, a human readable text format means that we can integrate with the standard tooling for versioning and distributed development.

OWL is a W3C standard ontology representation language; an ontology is a fully computable set of statements, describing the things and their relationships. These statements can be reasoned over, inferences made and contradictions detected automatically using an off-the-shelf reasoner.

0.12 is planned to be the final, feature complete release before the 1.0 release. New features will not be added before 1.0. Key new features in 0.12 are:

  • Complete support for OWL 2, include data types

  • OWL documentation can be queries as normal clojure metadata

  • New namespaces, query and fixture

  • Completion of rendering functionality

  • Regularisation of interfaces: where relevant functions now take an ontology as the first argument.

  • Updated to Hermit 1.3.7.3, OWL API 3.4.5

Tawny is available at https://github.com/phillord/tawny-owl, or as a maven artifact from http://clojars.org. The development of tawny-owl is documented in my journal at http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/category/all/professional/tech/tawny-owl