Status: intermediate draft

Authors and contributors:

• Chris Mungall (author)

Date: 2012

Document Type: ontology_design_pattern

Uberon contains explicit disjointness axioms between Uberon classes and classes in external ontologies.

For example:

• neck of organ DisjointWith MA:"neck organ"
• hypodermis DisjointWith WBbt:"hypodermis"
• tibia DisjointWith FBbt:"tibia"

These axioms can be used by humans and computers to avoid accidentally falsely equating distinct structures based on nomenclature. In many cases these exioms are redundant with more general disjointness axioms within the ontology, but are still retained as a separate explicit confirmation of disjointness.

For example, if the FBbt class for tibia was made a subclass of tibia in uberon, then a reasoner would find this to be unsatisfiable

• see Fig4 from the Uberon paper:

The additional axiom in external-disjoints.owl serves as an additional confirmation that this would be wrong.

The ontology is called uberon/external-disjoints.owl

It is not bundled with any of the main ontology releases.

The ontology is maintained as an obo file, and published as OWL.

Note that in OWL, DisjointWith refers purely to class disjointness, not spatial disjointness.

• http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/uberon/external-disjoints.owl
• http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org/1260