In situ migration of handcrafted ontologies to reason-able forms

A methodology for in situ migration of a handcrafted Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), to a formal and expressive OWL version is presented. Well-known untangling methodologies recommend wholesale re-coding. Unable to do this, we have tackled portions of the DAG, lexically dissecting term names to property-based descriptions in OWL. The different levels of expressivity are presented in a model called the feature escalator, where the user can choose the level needed for the application and the expressivity that delivers requirement. The results of applying the methodology to some areas of the gene ontology (GO) demonstrate the validity of the methodology. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.