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Causal Activity Models

CAMs (Causal Activity Models) are small knowledge graphs built using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The CAM database combines many CAM graphs along with a large merged bio-ontology containing the full vocabulary of concepts referenced within the individual CAMs. Each CAM describes an instantiation of some of those concepts in a particular context, modeling the interactions between those instances as an interlinked representation of a complex biological or environmental process. The ontology-based implementation of CAMs has positive features:

• Being expressed in OWL, the rules for inferring additional relations between knowledge graph nodes are robust and well defined, in terms of whether relations are transitive, symmetric, inferable from chains of other properties, and standardized reasoning tools exist for applying the rules.
• The specific bio-ontologies referenced within CAMs are themselves developed in OWL and provide a rich set of inference rules. CAMs readily make use of all the semantic properties intended by the source ontologies (e.g., class and property hierarchies).