Interacting with Ontologies and Linked Data through Controlled Natural Languages and Dialogues

This paper describes a suite of tools developed at the University of Leeds which aim to make it easier for domain experts to be involved in the creation and use of ontologies. The paper summarises the main features of the tools and gives a short summary of our evaluations and experiences using the tools with domain experts. 1 Expressing Knowledge through a Controlled Natural Language At the core of our suite of tools for supporting domain experts when using ontologies is the use of a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) as the main way to express knowledge in a way that: • is easy to understand and write by domain experts and • can be automatically translated into a logical form, in particular an ontology language We have adopted Rabbit, a CNL designed by the Ordnance Survey – the mapping agency of Great Britain – to enable domain experts (e.g. cartographers) to contribute to the development of ontologies for describing the Ordnance Survey’s topographic data [7]. Although inspired by the topographical domain, Rabbit has been designed to be domain independent. The language is designed to be directly mappable to OWL, the web ontology language.