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. Note that in terms of expressivity, sparrow lies between RDF/S and OWL-DL.

Sparrow

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

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. Concepts definitions can be further elaborated using concept axioms. Consider the following sentence.

concept Animal kind_of Organism

This sentence states that the concept '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 (sometimes referred to as "isa"). 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 can be combined through conjunction (and). For example, the sentences:

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

Here, the terms 'and' and 'not' are sparrow reserved words. The sentence states that an animal is an organism but not a plant.

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'