This project aims to build an ontology authoring interface in which the user is engaged in a dialogue with the system in controlled natural language. To investigate what such a dialogue might be like, a layered annotation scheme is being developed for interactions between ontology authors and the Protégé ontology authoring environment. A pilot experiment has been conducted with ontology authors, which reveals the complexity of mapping between user-interface actions and acts that appear in natural language dialogues; it also suggests the addition of some unanticipated types of dialogue acts and points the way to some possible enhancements of the authoring interface.
