<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>In this article we describe an approach to representing and building ontologies
advocated by the Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics groups at the University
of Manchester. The hand-crafting of ontologies offers an easy and rapid avenue to
delivering ontologies. Experience has shown that such approaches are unsustainable.
Description logic approaches have been shown to offer computational support for
building sound, complete and logically consistent ontologies. A new knowledge
representation language, DAML + OIL, offers a new standard that is able to support
many styles of ontology, from hand-crafted to full logic-based descriptions with
reasoning support. We describe this language, the OilEd editing tool, reasoning
support and a strategy for the language’s use. We finish with a current example,
in the Gene Ontology Next Generation (GONG) project, that uses DAML + OIL as
the basis for moving the Gene Ontology from its current hand-crafted, form to one
that uses logical descriptions of a concept’s properties to deliver a more complete
version of the ontology.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Feb; 4(1):133-141