I have been working on a Clojure library for developing OWL ontologies (n.d.a) There have been two significant advances with this library recently. First, I have changed its name from clojure-owl to tawny-owl. I was never really happy with the original name; I think it is bad practice to name something after the language it uses (even partly, as the many jlibraries attest), and there was several other libraries around for manipulating OWL in clojure, albeit in different ways. “Tawny” is simple and straight-forward and memorable, I think. At the same time, I moved to Github because I can now just updated readme.md, rather than having to update a separate website.

I have been developing a library written in Clojure, that I can use for building OWL ontologies programmatically (n.d.a) The basic idea behind this library is to give me something that looks like Manchester syntax (n.d.b/) but which is none the less fully programmatic; it can be extended arbitrarily, both for general use and for one-off, single ontology specific custom code.

I have previously described the difficulty that we have had publishing in semantic web conferences (n.d.a) the two main conferences (ESWC and ISWC) both publish with Springer-Verlag, and so provide no open access option.

I was recently described by Duncan Hull as waging a one man war for metadata on the web. There is a degree of truth in this, of course. Since Lindsay Marshall (n.d.a/) and myself started work on Greycite (n.d.b) (Lindsay writes it, then I break it, roles both of us are happy with), there is a degree of truth in this. I have found myself continually amazed by which websites do or do not carry metadata. Often there is none whatsoever, and sometimes it’s just wrong.

When I started work on Clojure-owl the original intention was to provide myself with a more programmatic environment for writing ontologies, where I could work with a full programming language at to define the classes I wanted (n.d.a) After some initial work with functions taking strings, I have moved to an approach where classes (and other ontological entities), are each assigned to a Lisp symbol (n.d.b) I’m using “symbol” rather than “atom” because its a bit more accurate, especially as Clojure uses “atom” with a different meaning.