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 variant that is meant as a "lightweight" alternative to RDF/S and OWL for defining ontologies. This document describes the syntax of sparrow.

Basic Sparrow

Concepts and roles in sparrow are defined using sentences. We assume two special concepts sparrow:top and sparrow:bottom, which correspond to most general (the set of all individuals) and the least general (the empty set) concepts found in description-logic languages. The term sparrow:top consists of the sparrow namespace and the atomic term (concept) top.

The following expression introduces a new concept called 'myConcept'.

myConcept is_a sparrow:top. 

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'