XOL Ontology Exchange Language

XOL is an XML-based ontology-exchange language. Although XOL was designed for exchange of bioinformatics ontologies, it can be used for ontologies in any domain.

XOL was designed in response to a study of ontology languages performed by the BioOntology Core Group. That study found that no existing ontology-exchange language satisfied the requirements of the bioinformatics community. Furthermore, the group stated the need for a language with the semantics of object-oriented knowledge representation systems, but with an XML syntax. XOL was designed to satisfy those two objectives.

XOL was developed by Peter Karp of Pangea Systems, Vinay Chaudhri of SRI International, and Jerome Thomere of SRI International. Please send comments to pkarp @ PangeaSystems.com and to chaudhri @ ai.sri.com, and thomere @ ai.sri.com.

XOL Documents

The following XOL-related documents are available at this site: The XOL WWW site is still evolving. Over time we expect to add more information such as sample XOL ontologies.

XOL is not a product of Pangea Systems.