Tawny-OWL 1.2

About six months after the release of Tawny-OWL 1.1.0 (n.d.a) I am pleased to announce the 1.2 release. There have been a number of changes in this release, some planned, some not.

The planned changes have been an extension of the rendering capabilities of Tawny-OWL; it is now possible to render an OWLEntity entirely into Clojure data structures. The main reason for this was to allow use of core.logic for building an effective syntactic query language over OWL. This is now complete, although more work needs to be done on tawny.query if this is to be exploited to it’s fullest.

The main unplanned release was caused by a change in the OWL API which had dramatic (and negative) consequences for Tawny-OWL performance. The details of this change have been documented elsewhere (n.d.b) Fixing this actually resulted in small increases in rendering performance. This also lead me to some aggresive micro-optimisations of the Tawny-OWL code base, mostly meaning I can avoid using variadic function calls where necessary (these box arguments into a list, which can be quite slow). On small ontologies, Tawny-OWL will load several times faster now.

The pace of development on Tawny-OWL has slowed somewhat in recent times; partly, this is because it is now reaching a point of maturity. However, I have also been diverted by two other projects. I have put a reasonable amount of effort into Linked buffer which provides a rich literate environment, originally intended for Tawny-OWL, although it is not specific to it. And, secondly, I have started a manual for Tawny-OWL called Take Wing. This is developed using Linked Buffer. Not the first example of a literate program as a manual, I know, but probably the first example a literate ontology as a manual.

Despite the slowed pace, I have a roadmap for Tawny 1.3. I wish to support what I am calling transactional restrictions; these are a set of axioms which are either added all together or not at all. The use case for this comes from the Gene Ontology who use annotations on their annotations to describe evidence for particular statements. The meta annotations should not be added to the ontology, until the annotations are.

And secondly, I am reworking tawny.pattern — the existing value partition support has already been changed, and there are some new functions which make it easy to turn a functional pattern into a macro one; the latter produce the more attractive syntax.

No doubt there will be a few unplanned additions also!