OWL to English: a tool for generating organised easily-navigated hypertexts from ontologies

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Abstract

It has frequently been observed that domain experts are not necessarily ontology experts, and that the production of ontologies would be aided if they could read and edit axioms in natural language. The SWAT Tools Verbaliser is available, via a web interface, for verbalising OWL ontologies as texts in a controlled fragment of English. Taking as input any OWL ontology, the verbaliser creates a lexicon containing entries for all the entities in the input, and uses it to generate an English sentence corresponding to each logical axiom. These sentences are then organised into a document structure similar to that of an encyclopaedia, with an entry providing a definition, typology and examples for each entity. The output is either organised, easily-navigable English text encoded in XML, or a copy of the input OWL in which each entity is annotated with its description entry. The generated texts have been evaluated in a number of ways which are briefly presented here.