Sparrow Language

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Intended audience

This document is intended for SEEK and Kepler developers. It is a DRAFT DESIGN DOCUMENT and does not reflect functionality as it currently exists in Kepler or SEEK. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

Introduction

Sparrow is a description-logic syntax that is meant as a "lightweight" alternative to RDF/S and OWL for defining ontologies. This document details the sparrow syntax.

Sparrow

Sparrow ontologies, like description-logic ontologies, define concepts, roles, individuals, and properties.

Basic Concept Definitions

Concepts in sparrow are defined using sentences. For instance, we can introduce a new concept called 'vegetarian' into an ontology using the following sentence.

concept Vegetarian

This sentence simply states that the term 'Vegetarian' is a concept. In the above sentence, the term 'concept' is a reserved word. We can give further elaborate concepts using concept axioms, for example:

concept Animal kind_of Organism

This sentence states that the term 'Animal' is a sub-concept of the concept 'Organism'. In other words, every animal is an organism. The term 'kind_of' is a reserved word. Both 'Animal' and 'Organism' are asserted as being concepts by this sentence. The sentence is equivalent to the following three sparrow sentences.

concept Organism
concept Animal
concept Animal kind_of Organism.

Multiple sentences defining the same concept are combined through conjunction (and). For example, the sentences:

concept Organism
concept Animal
concept Plant
concept Animal kind_of Organism
concept Animal kind_of not Plant

can be combined into the sentence:

concept Animal kind_of Organism and not Plant

That is, an animal is an organism but not a plant. The terms 'and' and 'not' are sparrow reserved words.

Capitalization is not important in sparrow, thus the previous sentence is equivalent to:

CONCEPT animal KIND_OF organism AND NOT plant

Complex Concept Definitions

Packaging Sparrow Ontologies

A sparrow ontology consists of one or more sparrow sentences. The following two sentences define

sparrow define myOnt uri 'http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/#myOnt'
sparrow import yourOnt uri 'http://seek.ecoinformatic.org/#yourOnt'