OntoVerbal: a Generic Tool and Practical Application to SNOMED CT

Ontology development is a non-trivial task requiring expertise in the chosen ontological language. We propose a method for making the content of ontologies more transparent by presenting, through the use of natural language generation, naturalistic descriptions of ontology classes as textual paragraphs. The method has been implemented in a proof-ofconcept system, OntoVerbal, that automatically generates paragraph-sized textual descriptions of ontological classes expressed in OWL. OntoVerbal has been applied to ontologies that can be loaded into Protégé and been evaluated with SNOMED CT, showing that it provides coherent, well-structured and accurate textual descriptions of ontology classes. Keywords—ontology verbalisation; natural language generation; OWL; SNOMED CT