Spicy owl pizza

Well…OWL and pizzas, to be exact: I was at an OWL workshop in Edinburgh this week and the practical examples involved creating an ontology of pizzas and ingredients. Using the Protégé tool, we created our ontology by adding ingredients and pizzas, and specifying what went into each pizza.

As interesting as the process was, it was a bit of a stretch to make it last two days: much of the time was waiting for the two organisers to free themselves from the tool’s problems – why insist on using an alpha software release? – and get back to the workshop as a whole. In fact, such was the time spent helping individuals with issues (myself included), the second day’s planning went out the window and the afternoon coffee break was only remembered five minutes after the workshop should have ended

Many of the attendees worked within biology and the Botanical Gardens enthusiast seated next to me left me in no doubt as to how useful OWL and applications like Protégé could be in building ontologies in that area.

It’s worth having a look at the software if this sort of thing interests you – the example we used was an effective way of building examples from real-life instances and it helped to map out the process. Sadly, the organisers failed to give us pizza for lunch and our hard work sorting out the meat from the veg was wasted