Lamy Jean-Baptiste - Ontologies with Python: Programming OWL 2.0 Ontologies with Python and Owlready2

For the past ten years, formal ontologies have become widely used in computer science to structure data and knowledge. In parallel, the Python programming language has become more and more widespread in teaching, business, and research. However, until recently, there were very few tools and resources dedicated to the use of ontologies in Python. In fact, most books or tutorials on ontologies are quite theoretical and do not address programming, or they are limited to more complex languages like Java.

This problem is particularly important in the biomedical field, where ontologies and Python are widely used. Too often, in my daily life as a teacher and researcher in medical informatics at Sorbonne Paris Nord University, I have seen students and engineers build ontologies that have subsequently not been used. The files remained on a USB key, because it was not easy to integrate ontologies with existing software.

This book exists to fill this gap. It shows how to use Python to easily access ontologies and publish them as dynamic websites, to build new ontologies, perform automatic reasoning, link entities to medical terminologies, or do some research in DBpedia using Owlready, a Python module I develop since 2013 for ontology-oriented programming. And, in this book, we will not be afraid to implement ontology-based programs: you will see more source codes than mathematical formulas!

This book is for anyone who wants to manipulate and build ontologies in Python, or to discover the world of ontologies from a practical point of view, and especially for computer scientists and semantic web application developers, bioinformaticians, scientists in the field of artificial intelligence, students in these disciplines or simply for the curious!