[ANN] Tawny-OWL 1.2

I am pleased to annouce the 1.2.0 release of Tawny-OWL, now available on
clojars and github (http://github.com/phillord/tawny-owl).

What is Tawny-OWL
=================

Tawny-OWL allows construction of OWL ontologies, in a evaluative, functional
and fully programmatic environment. Think of it as the ontology engineering
equivalent of [R](http://www.r-project.org/). It has many advantages over
traditional ontology engineering tools, also described in a
[video introduction](https://vimeo.com/89782389).

- An interactive shell or REPL to explore and create ontologies.
- Source code, with comments, editable using any of a range of IDEs.
- Fully extensible -- new syntaxes, new data sources can be added by users
- Patterns can be created for individual ontologies; related classes can be
  built easily, accurately and maintainably.
- A unit test framework with fully reasoning.
- A clean syntax for versioning with any VCS, integrated with the IDE
- Support for packaging, dependency resolution and publication
- Enabled continuous integration with both ontology and software dependencies


For the Clojure developer
=========================

Tawny-OWL is predominately designed as a programmatic application for ontology
development, but it can be used as an API. OWL ontologies are a set of
statements about things and their relationships; underneath these statements
map to a subset of first-order logic which makes it possible to answer 
questions about these statements using highly-optimised reasoners.


Take Wing
=========

Although in it's early stage, a rich manual is now being written for Tawny-OWL
https://github.com/phillord/take-wing
http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/take-wing/take_wing.html

Changes
=======
The main feature for the 1.2 release has been the incorporation of core.logic,
through (ab)use of the Tawny's querying facilities. A tighter integration
should be possible, having core.logic work directly over the OWL API, but this
was relatively simple to implement. It is performant enough for most uses (the
Gene Ontology renders to Clojure data structures in 1-2 seconds on my

One other substantial change is an aggressive micro-optimisation of
default-ontology and broadcast-ontology functionality. This functionality is
used in many parts of Tawny-OWL, so this results in a significant performance
enhancement.

Full change log is available.

https://github.com/phillord/tawny-owl/blob/master/docs/releases.md



-- 
Phillip Lord,                           Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
Lecturer in Bioinformatics,             Email: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk
School of Computing Science,            http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
Room 914 Claremont Tower,               skype: russet_apples
Newcastle University,                   twitter: phillord
NE1 7RU

Received on Friday, 10 October 2014 14:46:30 UTC