Putting OWL into Production at the European Bioinformatics Institute.

The Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO) is an OWL based ontology of experimental variables used in a wide range of biomedical studies. EFO has been in use since 2007 and was the first OWL ontology to be used in production ready data services at the EBI. As the ontology content, application requirements and the OWL language have evolved over time, this has presented several challenges in how to develop EFO and how best to deploy this within the applications. In this paper we describe our experiences of using OWL and the challenges we have faced which include; managing imports from multiple ontologies, optimising axiomatisation for performance, displaying the ontology in domain specific views, incorporating the ontology into a continuous integration framework and deploying the ontology in applications and curation tools. We also describe some of the tools we have developed and applications EFO is now used in and, finally, discuss our future challenges.