OntoVerbal: a Protégé plugin for verbalising ontology classes

OntoVerbal attempts to reduce the difficulties that non-ontology experts face in ‘reading’ ontologies, and the burden that ontology authors face in writing natural language definitions of classes. It does this by verbalising (i.e., automatically generating as natural language) the axioms of OWL classes. Its method relies on presenting, through the use of natural language generation (NLG), naturalistic descriptions of ontology classes as textual paragraphs. OntoVerbal has been implemented as a Protégé plugin that can offer an alternative ‘English’ view of a class and graphical views provided by various other Protégé plugins. The plugin provides automatic RDF label generation for ontology entities and a natural language description for each class, both for the asserted and ‘inferred’ forms of the class. We have made OntoVerbal, version 1.0, available for Protégé 4.1 via http://swatproject.org/demos.asp.