Tawny-OWL: A programmatic environment for ontologies. So what?

Ontologies are a mechanism for describing biology in terms of categories; essentially, like a taxonomy, rather than a statistical or mathematical model. Tawny-OWL is a new environment that I have created which allows for a fully programmatic development of ontologies.

In the first half of my talk, I will describe the motivation behind Tawny-OWL and the development of this new environment. In my last presentation to the group, I challenged the audience with the question "What if we had an environment like this?", to which one unimaginative individual replied "So, what if?". In the second half of my talk, I will describe some applications of this environment, that will help us to understand biology better and what I will be exploring in the near future.