homepage: http://purl.org/biotop

The increasing need for advanced ontology-based knowledge management in the life sciences and the description of its basic ontological entities is generally being acknowledged but, up until now, the development of biological ontologies lacks adherence to foundational principles of ontology design.

In light of this we introduce BioTop, a description-logic-based upper ontology of the most important entities in the domain of molecular biology, founded upon the formal principles mentioned above.

BioTop was originally based on GENIA, an ontology applied for corpus annotation in text mining contexts. In contrast to this, a major desideratum for BioTop is to describe as many classes as possible in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

To further ensure ontological validity we employ BFO as the top layer for the actual BioTop classes.

We use OWL-DL as a formal knowledge representation language and can thus use a terminological reasoner for classification in order to maintain consistency during the ontology engineering and also to automatically infer its full multihierarchical structure.