First official release of ROBOT!
We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0 of ROBOT. ROBOT is a command-line tool for working with OWL ontologies, especially ontologies in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) community. While graphical editors such as Protégé are great for editing ontologies interactively, ROBOT is for automating ontology development tasks such as importing terms, building terms from templates, converting between file formats, merging OWL files, reasoning, and testing ontologies. ROBOT helps to bridge the gap between ontology development and software engineering.
ROBOT is currently used in the development and release of GO, ENVO, ECO, RO, OBI, MRO, and a number of other ontologies in the OBO Library (http://obofoundry.org).
We have a new website http://robot.obolibrary.org, and are actively improving the documentation based on user feedback.
ROBOT is used in the ontology starter kit (https://github.com/INCATools/ontology-starter-kit/) which will create an ontology repository with pieces in place for running ROBOT-based workflows.
There are two main parts to ROBOT:
- robot-core is a library of common ontology operations, building on OWLAPI
- robot-command is a command-line interface for robot-core
ROBOT is written in Java and distributed from Maven Central (https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.obolibrary.robot). It can be used with any language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, so you can use robot-core operations in your own code. See the JavaDocs at https://www.javadoc.io/doc/org.obolibrary.robot/robot-core/.
The project is hosted on GitHub and shared under a BSD license. We welcome all suggestions for improvements, including additional documentation and training material https://github.com/ontodev/robot/issues.
Acknowledgments
ROBOT development has been supported by NIH grant 1 R24 HG010032-01, “Services to support the OBO foundry standards” to C. Mungall and B. Peters. The initial version of ROBOT was funded by the Gene Ontology Consortium. We thank the numerous developers for their contributions and users for their feedback