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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! |
