Drawing OWL 2 ontologies with Eddy the editor

In this paper we introduce Eddy, a new open-source tool for the graphical editing of OWL~2 ontologies. Eddy is specifically designed for creating ontologies in Graphol, a completely visual ontology language that is equivalent to OWL~2. Thus, in Eddy ontologies are easily drawn as diagrams, rather than written as sets of formulas, as commonly happens in popular ontology design and engineering environments. This makes Eddy particularly suited for usage by people who are more familiar with diagramatic languages for conceptual modeling rather than with typical ontology formalisms, as is often required in non-academic and industrial contexts. Eddy provides intuitive functionalities for specifying Graphol diagrams, guarantees their syntactic correctness, and allows for exporting them in standard OWL 2 syntax. A user evaluation study we conducted shows that Eddy is perceived as an easy and intuitive tool for ontology specification

Comparison and evaluation of ontology visualizations

In the last couple of years a large number of software aiming at visualizing ontologies were introduced, causing difficulties in selecting an objectively suitable visualizing tool. This work lists free and commercial tools in four groups named by the visualizing method used by members of each group. Furthermore a detailed examination of each tool in a separate section is presented. Finally the document comes to an end with an overview of all listed tools and a recommendation of the most powerful ones of each group

Una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes web de ingeniería ontológica

Ontology authoring, maintenance and use are never easy tasks, mostly due to the complexity of real domains and how they dynamically change as well as different background possessed by modellers about methodologies and formal languages. However, although the needs for ontologies are well-understood, not less important is to provide editing tools to manipulate and understand them. In this context, this work proposes and documents a reference architecture for such tools running in web environments. Moreover, it provides the rationale for boosting the collaborative development of a novel tool based on this architecture, named crowd. Previous surveys reveal that few Webbased ontology engineering environments have been developed and in addition, almost all of them are mere visualisers, with limited graphical features and lacking inference services.La definición, mantenimiento y use de ontologías son tareas difíciles debido, en mayor medida, a la complejidad inherente al mundo real y a como éste cambia dinámicamente. Asimismo, también se debe a las diferencias en conocimiento sobre metodologías y lenguajes formales por parte de los modeladores. Sin embargo, aunque la necesidad de crear y obtener ontologías es clave, es también importante contar con herramientas para manipularlas y entenderlas. Este trabajo propone y documenta una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes Web y ofrece los fundamentos para impulsar el desarrollo colaborativo de la herramienta crowd, la cual esta basada sobre dicha architectura. Revisiones previas de la literatura indican la existencia de un numero reducido ambientes para la Ingeniería Ontológica basados en tecnologías Web, sin embargo, casi en su totalidad son solo visualizadores de modelos con soporte gráfico limitado y ausencia de razonamiento lógico integrado.Facultad de Informátic

Graphol: Ontology Representation through Diagrams

Abstract. In this paper we present Graphol, a novel language for the diagram-matic representation of Description Logic (DL) ontologies. Graphol is designed with the aim of offering a completely visual representation to the users (notably, no formulas need to be used in the diagrams), thus helping the understanding of people not skilled in logic. At the same time, it provides designers with simple mechanisms for ontology editing, which free them from having to write down complex textual syntax. Through Graphol we can specify SROIQ(D) ontolo-gies, thus our language essentially captures the OWL 2 standard. In this respect, we developed a basic software tool to translate Graphol ontologies realized with the yEd graph editor into OWL 2 functional syntax specifications. We conducted some initial user evaluation tests, involving designers skilled in conceptual or on-tology modeling and users without specific logic background. From these tests, we obtained promising results about the effectiveness of our language for both visualization and editing of ontologies.

Towards a uniform user interface for editing data shapes

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Towards Conceptual Modelling Interoperability in a Web Tool for Ontology Engineering

The definition of suitable visual paradigms for ontology modelling is still an open issue. Despite obvious differences between the expressiveness of conceptual modelling (CM) languages and ontologies, many proposed tools have been based on UML, EER and ORM. Additionally, all of these tools support only one CM as visual language, reducing even more their modelling capabilities. In previous works, we have presented crowd as a Web architecture for graphical ontology designing in UML and logical reasoning to verify the relevant properties of these models. The aim of this tool is to extend the reasoning capabilities on top of visual representations as much as possible. In this paper, we present an extended crowd architecture and a new prototype focusing on an ontology-driven metamodel to enable different CMs visual languages for ontology modelling. Thus facilitating inter-model assertions across models represented in different languages, converting between modelling languages and reasoning on them. Finally, we detail the new architecture and demonstrate the usage of the prototype with simple examples.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Towards Conceptual Modelling Interoperability in a Web Tool for Ontology Engineering

The definition of suitable visual paradigms for ontology modelling is still an open issue. Despite obvious differences between the expressiveness of conceptual modelling (CM) languages and ontologies, many proposed tools have been based on UML, EER and ORM. Additionally, all of these tools support only one CM as visual language, reducing even more their modelling capabilities. In previous works, we have presented crowd as a Web architecture for graphical ontology designing in UML and logical reasoning to verify the relevant properties of these models. The aim of this tool is to extend the reasoning capabilities on top of visual representations as much as possible. In this paper, we present an extended crowd architecture and a new prototype focusing on an ontology-driven metamodel to enable different CMs visual languages for ontology modelling. Thus facilitating inter-model assertions across models represented in different languages, converting between modelling languages and reasoning on them. Finally, we detail the new architecture and demonstrate the usage of the prototype with simple examples

Extension Rules for Ontology Evolution within a Conceptual Modelling Tool

Ontology development and maintenance are complex tasks, so automatic tools are essential for a successful integration between the modeller’s intention and the formal semantics in an ontology. Never- theless, tools need to provide a way to capture the intuitive structures inherent to the conceptual modelling and to focus on ontology elements currently being refactored by abstracting the user from the whole ontol- ogy without losing consistency. This can be done by means of a set of extension rules that identify elements from an ontology and suggest pos- sible consistent evolutions. Rules guide the development of ontologies by taking source elements and refactoring. In this paper, we present a small catalogue of extension rules to cover these identified requirements and thus to be integrated into a tool for ontological modelling as built- in reasoning services. Each rule is defined and analysed by considering different theories of design patterns.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Towards Conceptual Modelling Interoperability in a Web Tool for Ontology Engineering

The definition of suitable visual paradigms for ontology modelling is still an open issue. Despite obvious differences between the expressiveness of conceptual modelling (CM) languages and ontologies, many proposed tools have been based on UML, EER and ORM. Additionally, all of these tools support only one CM as visual language, reducing even more their modelling capabilities. In previous works, we have presented crowd as a Web architecture for graphical ontology designing in UML and logical reasoning to verify the relevant properties of these models. The aim of this tool is to extend the reasoning capabilities on top of visual representations as much as possible. In this paper, we present an extended crowd architecture and a new prototype focusing on an ontology-driven metamodel to enable different CMs visual languages for ontology modelling. Thus facilitating inter-model assertions across models represented in different languages, converting between modelling languages and reasoning on them. Finally, we detail the new architecture and demonstrate the usage of the prototype with simple examples.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Extension Rules for Ontology Evolution within a Conceptual Modelling Tool

Ontology development and maintenance are complex tasks, so automatic tools are essential for a successful integration between the modeller’s intention and the formal semantics in an ontology. Never- theless, tools need to provide a way to capture the intuitive structures inherent to the conceptual modelling and to focus on ontology elements currently being refactored by abstracting the user from the whole ontol- ogy without losing consistency. This can be done by means of a set of extension rules that identify elements from an ontology and suggest pos- sible consistent evolutions. Rules guide the development of ontologies by taking source elements and refactoring. In this paper, we present a small catalogue of extension rules to cover these identified requirements and thus to be integrated into a tool for ontological modelling as built- in reasoning services. Each rule is defined and analysed by considering different theories of design patterns.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO