Regular Paths in SparQL: Querying the NCI Thesaurus

Detwiler, Landon T and Suciu, Dan and Brinkley, James F (2008) Regular Paths in SparQL: Querying the NCI Thesaurus. In Proceedings, American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium, pages pp. 161-165, Washington, DC.

Abstract

OWL, the Web Ontology Language, provides syntax and semantics for representing knowledge for the semantic web. Many of the constructs of OWL have a basis in the field of description logics. While the formal underpinnings of description logics have lead to a highly computable language, it has come at a cognitive cost. OWL ontologies are often unintuitive to readers lacking a strong logic background. In this work we describe GLEEN, a regular path expression library, which extends the RDF query language SparQL to support complex path expressions over OWL and other RDF-based ontologies. We illustrate the utility of GLEEN by showing how it can be used in a query-based approach to defining simpler, more intuitive views of OWL ontologies. In particular we show how relatively simple GLEEN-enhanced SparQL queries can create views of the OWL version of the NCI Thesaurus that match the views generated by the web-based NCI browser.