I am please to announce the second full release of Tawny-OWL, my library for fully programmatic development of OWL ontologies. Tawny-OWL now has a fairly large feature set and is becoming a rich development environment.

Perhaps the biggest single change in this release in terms of code base is the least immediately obvious from the user perspective. Previously a large part of the code base was using Java reflection and therefore quite slow. I have now type-hinted all the namespaces meaning that tawny should never reflect. The practical upshot of this is that Tawny runs faster; in the most extreme case, tawny.render is about 5x faster.

The most difficult change for me has be the regularisation of :subclass and :subproperty keywords. The reasons behind this have been described in great detail previously (n.d.) This was not an easy change to make as it breaks the syntax significantly; I should have made the change before Tawny 1.0, but I didn’t. I am hopefully that there will not be similar changes in future.

The roadmap for Tawny 1.2 is relatively simple; currently there is no good way to search over an ontology and to extract classes fulfilling certain requirements (short of direct invocation of the OWL API). I now have a simple implementation of search facilities operating over OWL using a combination of core.logic and tawny.query; hardening and extending this will be the next logical (ahem!) step.

n.d. https://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2985.