Introduction to the Ontology Abstraction Framework (OAF)

The Ontology Abstraction Framework (OAF) is a free and open-source software system for visually summarizing the structure of ontologies. The OAF enables users to create and explore structural summaries of ontologies called abstraction networks. The OAF is being developed as part of an ongoing research project at the Structural Analysis of Biomedical Ontologies Center (SABOC) in the Computer Science Department at the New Jersey Insitute of Technology. The OAF is playing a key role in SABOC's research into the structure of biomedical ontologies (specifically, the ontologies found in the NCBO BioPortal).

For more information, see: About: What is an Abstraction Network?

The OAF supports ontologies in Web Ontology Language (OWL), Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO), and SNOMED CT RF2 formats. Experimental support for NDF-RT, as represented in Apelon DTS format, is also available.

The OAF has two major components: a system for creating, visualizing, and exploring abstraction networks and a hybrid text-diagram concept browser for reviewing the modeling of individual ontology concepts.

The OAF is released in three versions (shown on the right). All versions of the OAF include these main components, but additional functionality is available in each version. For a comparison see: About: Comparison of OAF Versions.

Funding for the OAF is provided by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 CA190779.

The theoretical foundations of the OAF are described in: Ochs C, Geller J, Perl Y, Musen MA. A unified software framework for deriving, visualizing, and exploring abstraction networks for ontologies. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2016 Aug 31;62:90-105.

The OAF Protege Plugin and OAF for OWL/OBO utilize the OWL API and Protege API.