Combining Semantic Wikis and Controlled Natural Language

Combining Semantic Wikis and Controlled Natural Language Tobias Kuhn Department of Informatics University of Zurich, Switzerland tkuhn@ifi.uzh.ch ABSTRACT We demonstrate AceWiki that is a semantic wiki using the controlled natural language Attempto Controlled English (ACE). The goal is to enable easy creation and modification of ontologies through the web. Texts in ACE can automati- cally be translated into first-order logic and other languages, for example OWL. Previous evaluation showed that ordinary people are able to use AceWiki without being instructed. Keywords Controlled Natural Language, Attempto Controlled English (ACE), Semantic Web, Semantic Wiki, AceWiki, Ontology 1. INTRODUCTION Most of the tasks the Semantic Web is eventually supposed to fulfill rely on the availability of ontologies. However, the creation and maintenance of ontologies is difficult because a number of domain experts — most of which are not familiar with formal languages — have to agree on a conceptualiza- tion of the respective domain. For that reason, it is crucial for the future of the Semantic Web to provide tools that make the creation of ontologies easy for everybody. AceWiki1 tackles this problem by combining semantic wikis with controlled natural language. The goal of AceWiki is to enable ordinary people with no background in formal lan- guages to create expressive ontologies in a collaborative and intuitive way without the need of installing an application. 2. BACKGROUND There are several existing semantic wiki systems, see e.g. [3] for a brief survey. Unfortunately, most of those wikis do not support expressive ontology languages in a general way. Furthermore, they are often hard to understand for people who are not familiar with the technical terms. Attempto Controlled English (ACE)2 is the controlled nat- ural language that is used for AceWiki. Being a subset of English, ACE looks completely natural. Restrictions of the syntax and the definition of a small set of interpretation rules make it a formal language that is automatically translatable into first-order logic. ACE covers a large part of natural En- glish: singular and plural noun phrases, active and passive voice, relative phrases, anaphoric references, existential and universal quantifiers, negation, and much more. 1See [3], [4], and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki 2See [1] and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch Figure 1: A screenshot of the predictive editor of AceWiki. The fragment “Every area is” has already been entered and now the editor shows all possibil- ities to continue the sentence. ACE has been used as a natural language front-end to OWL with a bidirectional mapping of ACE to OWL [2]. AceWiki uses this for translating ACE sentences into OWL. The same work also introduces a Prot´eg´e plugin called “ACE View” which enables to manage ontologies in ACE within the Pro- t´eg´e environment. 3. SYSTEM In AceWiki, the ontological entities are represented by nat- ural language words and phrases. Proper names (e.g. “Zu- rich”, “Switzerland”, “Europe”) are interpreted as individu- als, nouns (e.g. “city”, “country”) are interpreted as classes, and transitive verbs (e.g. “borders”), of -constructs (e.g. “part of”), and transitive adjectives (e.g. “located-in”) are interpreted as binary relations. Using those words together with the predefined function words of ACE (e.g.“a”, “every”, “if”,“then”,“and”,“not”,“is”,“that”), ontological statements are expressed as ACE sentences: As those examples show, the formal statements are easily readable and understandable by any English speaking per- son. In order to enable easy creation and modification of ACE sentences, AceWiki integrates a predictive editor that shows step-by-step the words that are syntactically possi- arXiv:0810.3076v1 [cs.HC] 17 Oct 2008 Figure 2: A screenshot of the web interface of AceWiki showing the wiki article for the class “con- tinent”. ble at a given position in the sentence. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of this editor. Each of the ontological entities gets its own wiki article. Figure 2 shows an example. Every article consist of ACE sentences most of which can be translated into OWL, e.g: ACE is more expressive than OWL, and thus we can write statements that go beyond the semantic expressivity of OWL (e.g. rule-like statements). Such statements are marked with a red triangle (and are currently ignored by the reasoner): Furthermore, questions can be used to query the knowledge base, e.g: Thus, ACE is an ontology language, a rule language, and a query language at the same time. AceWiki uses the OWL reasoner Pellet3 to perform rea- soning tasks over the sentences of the wiki that are OWL- compliant. In order to ensure the consistency of the ontol- ogy, every new sentence is checked — immediately after its creation — whether it would introduce a contradiction. If this is the case then the sentence is not included in the on- tology and displayed in red font: 3http://pellet.owldl.com/ The reasoner is also used t

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