title: Webulous and the Webulous Google Add-On--a web service and application for ontology building from templates.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Authoring bio-ontologies is a task that has traditionally been undertaken by skilled experts trained in understanding complex languages such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL), in tools designed for such experts. As requests for new terms are made, the need for expert ontologists represents a bottleneck in the development process. Furthermore, the ability to rigorously enforce ontology design patterns in large, collaboratively developed ontologies is difficult with existing ontology authoring software.
  
  
  METHODS
  We present Webulous, an application suite for supporting ontology creation by design patterns. Webulous provides infrastructure to specify templates for populating ontology design patterns that get transformed into OWL assertions in a target ontology. Webulous provides programmatic access to the template server and a client application has been developed for Google Sheets that allows templates to be loaded, populated and resubmitted to the Webulous server for processing.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The development and delivery of ontologies to the community requires software support that goes beyond the ontology editor. Building ontologies by design patterns and providing simple mechanisms for the addition of new content helps reduce the overall cost and effort required to develop an ontology. The Webulous system provides support for this process and is used as part of the development of several ontologies at the European Bioinformatics Institute.
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0643-3144
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jupp
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Burdett
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Danielle
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Welter
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Sirarat
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sarntivijai
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Helen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Parkinson
authors.affiliation: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI),European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Malone
mesh_terms: D064229:Biological Ontologies; D020407:Internet; D057386:Search Engine; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Google App; OWL; Ontology; Spreadsheet; Webulous