Ontology development

Ontology development

Overview

PPO classes are defined in a set of spreadsheet files in the directory src/entities. Each file contains a table of PPO classes, where each row in the table contains the information needed to define a single PPO class. These spreadsheet files are, effectively, the "source code" that is used to compile the complete PPO. The file src/ppo-base.owl contains the "base" PPO ontology, which is simply an empty ontology except for some basic imports and IRI prefix definitions.

The format of the source spreadsheet files

The format of the source spreadsheet files is fully described in the OntoPilot documentation.

Assigning entity IDs

We follow the OBO conventions for all ontology entity IDs; that is, each PPO entity has an ID of the form "PPO:nnnnnnn", where "nnnnnnn" is a 7-character, 0-padded integer string.

We divide PPO entities up into six logical groupings, each of which corresponds with a source file in the PPO sources. Each of these conceptual entity groups has an assigned range of ID numbers. ID number assignments to ontology entities within each group are sequential. The assigned ID ranges are recorded in the file src/entities/ID_ranges.txt.