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. New concepts can be "created" using the following sentence.

concept vegetarian.

This sentence simply states that the term 'vegetarian' is a concept. Instead, we can give more details by defining concepts.

concept animal is_a organism.

This sentence states that the term 'animal' is a sub-concept of the concept 'organism'. In this example, both 'animal' and 'organism' are asserted as being concepts. In other words, the above expression is equivalent to the following three expressions in sparrow.

concept organism.
concept animal.
concept animal is_a organism.

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'