NucLexNuclear Medicine Lexicon and Theranostics Ontology
Stage W0: private living prototype12 of 30 manuscripts drafted, 0 reviewed; 50 lexicon entries in draftWhat each later stage would need to show

Lexicon · Mathematical and computational foundations

Lexicon entryDraftNX-C013

OWL

Fully specified name: OWL (concept)

The Web Ontology Language, a W3C language for formally expressing ontologies.

Scope note
The selected profile and semantics constrain reasoning.
Synonyms
Web Ontology Language
Monograph
Description logics (planned; brief only)
External mappings
None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
Formal status
Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.

Notes

OWL (Web Ontology Language) is the W3C standard for writing ontologies that software can reason over. OWL 2, the current version, lets an author declare classes, properties, and individuals, define classes by necessary and sufficient conditions, and state axioms such as disjointness, transitivity, and cardinality. An OWL ontology is usually serialized as RDF, and its meaning is given by a formal semantics grounded in Description logic.

OWL 2 defines profiles, each a syntactic restriction chosen for a reasoning task. OWL 2 EL supports large terminologies with many classes and fast classification; OWL 2 QL supports query answering over databases; OWL 2 RL supports rule-based implementation. The profile chosen determines what can be said and what a reasoner is guaranteed to compute, which is the point of the scope note. An ontology written in full OWL 2 DL can express more than one written in EL but may be impractical to classify at scale, and an inference that holds under one semantics may not hold under another.

For a nuclear medicine reader OWL is the format in which many biomedical ontologies, including those of the OBO Foundry family, are published, and the format a formal NucLex ontology would be expressed in if one were built. The W3C OWL 2 overview is the entry point to the specification.

Sources consulted (1)
  • https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-overview/