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.

Sparrow

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

Basics: Simple 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. 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 other words, every animal is an organism. 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 is_a organism.

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

concept organism.
concept animal.
concept plant.
concept animal is_a organism.
concept animal is_a not plant.

can be combined into the equivalent sentence:

concept animal is_a organism and not plant.

In other words, an animal is an organism but not a plant.

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'