| Date: | 2021, May 4 |
| Time: | 10:00 a. m. |
| Place: | Online |
| Author: | Hastings, Janna |
| Title: | Liberating OWL from Java: The Horned OWL Rust Library and Python Bridge |
OWL has many different language elements and serialization formats, and is therefore programmatically tricky to work with. The canonical software library for working with OWL is the OWL API, a Java library that reads, writes and interconverts between OWL formats and provides an interface to OWL reasoners. Dependency on Java, however, blocks wide adoption of OWL technology in modern lightweight technology stacks such as those used in data science and bioinformatics, which primarily harness Python and R. Rust is a modern lightweight memory-efficient programming language that has very good bridges to other programming languages. In this talk I will present Horned OWL, an OWL library developed in Rust by Phillip Lord that is able to process large bio-ontologies much more quickly and with much less memory than its Java counterpart. I will also show an experimental bridge into Python, py-horned-owl, that I have been working on in collaboration with James Overton (the developer of ROBOT).