OWL
In order to best understand RO, it helps tremendously to be familiar with OWL2. This advice does not necessarily hold for looking at RO through an application-specific prism: here the best way to view RO will be dictated by the application and the domain. However, when looking at the entire ontology understanding OWL2 will definitely help. At a minimum, it helps to know:
- How to read ManchesterSyntax
- The difference between an ObjectProperty and an AnnotationProperty
- The meaning of Object Property Characteristics, such as 'Transitive'
- The meaning of Object Property Axiom types, such as SubPropertyOf
- What a PropertyChain is
- What it means to import an ontology
It also helps to know some of the practices of the OBO Community. For example:
- naming conventions
- ID policy and URI structure (also: Identifiers).
- Use of the IAO metadata vocabulary
Finally, for browsing in Protege, we recommend a tutorial such as the Pizza tutorial. A few additional tips help:
- Hovering over an axiom reveals its ontology source (RO imports parts of other ontologies)
- Using a reasoner will show you entailed axioms
- A colored "@" means the axiom has annotations (e.g. provenance of the axiom). Click on the "@" to see these