Generating application ontologies from reference ontologies.

The semantic web provides the possiblity of linking together large numbers of biomedical ontologies. Unfortunately, many of the biomedical ontologies that have been developed are domain-specific and do not share a common structure that will allow them to be easily combined. Reference ontologies provide the necessary ontological framework for linking together these smaller, specialized ontologies. We present extensions to the semantic web query language SparQL that will allow researchers to develop application ontologies that are derived from reference ontologies. We have modified the ARQ query processor to support subqueries, recursive subqueries, and Skolem functions for node creation. We demonstrate the utility of these extensions by deriving an application ontology from the Foundational Model of Anatomy.