AceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki using controlled
natural language - Attempto Controlled English (ACE) in our case - can make
ontology management easy for everybody. Sentences in ACE can automatically be
translated into first-order logic, OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates the OWL
reasoner Pellet and ensures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous
results have shown that people with no background in logic are able to add
formal knowledge to AceWiki without being instructed or trained in advance

Kuhn, Tobias

English

arXiv

AceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki using controlled natural language - Attempto Controlled English (ACE) in our case - can make ontology management easy for everybody. Sentences in ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic, OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates the OWL reasoner Pellet and ensures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous results have shown that people with no background in logic are able to add formal knowledge to AceWiki without being instructed or trained in advance.</p

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AceWiki: Collaborative ontology management in controlled natural language

AceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki using controlled natural language - Attempto Controlled English (ACE) in our case - can make ontology management easy for everybody. Sentences in ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic, OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates the OWL reasoner Pellet and ensures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous results have shown that people with no background in logic are able to add formal knowledge to AceWiki without being instructed or trained in advance

Kuhn, T

ZORA

University of ZurichZurich Open Repository and ArchiveWinterthurerstr. 190CH-8057 Zurichhttp://www.zora.uzh.chYear: 2008AceWiki: Collaborative ontology management in controllednatural languageKuhn, TKuhn, T. AceWiki: Collaborative ontology management in controlled natural language. In: Proceedings of the ThirdWorkshop on Semantic Wikis - The Wiki Way of Semantics. 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Tenerife,Spain, 02 June 2008 - 02 June 2008, 94-99.Postprint available at:http://www.zora.uzh.chPosted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich.http://www.zora.uzh.chOriginally published at:Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Semantic Wikis - The Wiki Way of Semantics. 5th European Semantic WebConference, Tenerife, Spain, 02 June 2008 - 02 June 2008, 94-99.Kuhn, T. AceWiki: Collaborative ontology management in controlled natural language. In: Proceedings of the ThirdWorkshop on Semantic Wikis - The Wiki Way of Semantics. 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Tenerife,Spain, 02 June 2008 - 02 June 2008, 94-99.Postprint available at:http://www.zora.uzh.chPosted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich.http://www.zora.uzh.chOriginally published at:Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Semantic Wikis - The Wiki Way of Semantics. 5th European Semantic WebConference, Tenerife, Spain, 02 June 2008 - 02 June 2008, 94-99.AceWiki: Collaborative ontology management in controllednatural languageAbstractAceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki using controlled natural language - AttemptoControlled English (ACE) in our case - can make ontology management easy for everybody. Sentencesin ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic, OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates theOWL reasoner Pellet and ensures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous results have shownthat people with no background in logic are able to add formal knowledge to AceWiki without beinginstructed or trained in advance.AceWiki: Collaborative Ontology Managementin Controlled Natural LanguageTobias KuhnDepartment of Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerlandtkuhn@ifi.uzh.chhttp://www.ifi.uzh.ch/cl/tkuhnAbstract. AceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki usingcontrolled natural language — Attempto Controlled English (ACE) inour case — can make ontology management easy for everybody. Sen-tences in ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic,OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates the OWL reasoner Pellet and en-sures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous results have shownthat people with no background in logic are able to add formal knowledgeto AceWiki without being instructed or trained in advance.1 IntroductionSince ontologies are often defined within communities, semantic wikis could beused for their collaborative creation and management. Unfortunately, most ofthe existing semantic wikis do not support expressive ontology languages in ageneral way. They do not allow the users to add complex axioms like “everylandlocked country borders no sea”. Furthermore, the existing semantic wikisare often hard to understand for people who are not familiar with the technicalterms of logic and ontologies.AceWiki1 tries to solve both problems by using controlled natural language.Ordinary people who have no background in logic should be able to understand,modify, and extend the formal content of a wiki.Many existing semantic wikis are classical wikis enriched with semantic an-notations. The goal is not to manage stand-alone ontologies, but rather to givesome kind of formal backbone to the wiki articles. We follow a different approach— similar e.g. to the myOntology project [7] — by providing a wiki that is dedi-cated to building and maintaining ontologies. In contrast to myOntology, we donot restrict ourselves to lightweight (i.e. relatively inexpressive) ontologies. Theuse of controlled natural language allows us to express also complex axioms ina natural way. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the AceWiki interface.In our usage scenario, a community of domain experts uses AceWiki to cre-ate and maintain a formal knowledge base in a collaborative manner. There aretwo exemplary wiki instances — one about geography and the other about pro-tein interactions — that demonstrate how AceWiki could be used to representknowledge of such communities.1 See [6] and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewikiFig. 1. The web interface of the AceWiki prototypeAceWiki has been introduced in [6]. Since then, several new features havebeen added, for example the integration of a reasoner and the support for numberrestrictions (“at most 3”, “exactly 5”, etc.).2 Attempto Controlled EnglishAttempto Controlled English (ACE)2 is the controlled natural language that isused for AceWiki. ACE appears completely natural since it is a subset of English.Restrictions of the syntax and the definition of a small set of interpretation rulesmake it a formal language that is automatically translatable into first-order logic.ACE supports a wide range of natural language constructs: singular and pluralnoun phrases, active and passive voice, relative phrases, anaphoric references,existential and universal quantifiers, negation, modality, and more. In the past,ACE has successfully been applied for different tasks in different research areas,for example as a query language for ontologies [1], as a knowledge representationlanguage for the biomedical domain [4], and as a rule language for a multi-semantics rule engine [5].Furthermore, ACE has been used as a natural language front-end to OWLwith a bidirectional mapping of ACE to OWL [3]. This mapping covers allof OWL 2 except data properties and some very complex class descriptions.AceWiki relies on this work for translating ACE sentences into OWL, whichallows us then to do reasoning with existing OWL reasoners.2 See [2] and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.chFig. 2. The predictive editor of AceWiki3 Design and EvaluationThe goal of AceWiki is to show that semantic wikis can be more natural and atthe same time more expressive than existing semantic wikis.Naturalness is achieved by representing the formal statements in ACE. SinceACE is a subset of natural English, every English speaker can immediately readand understand the content of the wiki. In order to enable easy creation ofACE sentences, AceWiki provides a predictive editor that shows step-by-stepthe words that are syntactically possible at a given position in the sentence.Figure 2 shows a screenshot of the predictive editor of AceWiki. Furthermore,the AceWiki interface does not use technical terms like “ontological element”,“property”, or “subclass” but uses instead terms like “word”, “transitive verb”,or “hierarchy” which should be much more familiar to people with no backgroundin logic.AceWiki makes use of the high expressivity of ACE that goes beyond OWLand SWRL. We do not like the idea of cutting down the expressivity just forthe sake of reasoning performance. Even if some statements become so complexthat it is almost impossible to do reasoning with them, it is better to have themformalized than just left out. We do not lose anything, since we are free to ignorethose complex statements for certain reasoning tasks.In our previous work [6], we conducted a user experiment that proved thatordinary people with no background in logic are able to deal with AceWiki. Theparticipants — without being instructed how to interact with the interface —were asked to add knowledge to AceWiki. About 80% of the created sentenceswere correct and sensible. This is remarkable since most of the sentences werequite complex: more than 60% of them contained an implication or a negation orboth. Using the predictive editor which the participants had never seen before,they needed on average only five minutes to create their first correct sentence.4 Reasoning in AceWikiWe have started to integrate the OWL reasoner Pellet3 into AceWiki. Since ACEsentences can be beyond the expressivity of OWL, the reasoner cannot considerall sentences. In order to make this clear to the users, each sentence is tagged asblue (inside of OWL) or red (outside of OWL):In this way, it is easy to explain to the users that only the blue statements areconsidered when the reasoner is used. We plan to provide an interface that allowsskilled users to export the formal content of the wiki and to use it within anexternal reasoner or rule-engine. Thus, even though the red statements cannotbe interpreted by the built-in reasoner they can still be useful.Consistency checking plays a crucial role because any other reasoning task re-quires a consistent ontology in order to return useful results. Most other semanticwikis do not have this problem since their languages are simply not expressiveenough to ever run into inconsistency.In order to ensure that the ontology is always consistent, AceWiki checksevery new sentence — immediately after its creation — whether it is consis-tent with the current ontology. Otherwise, the sentence is not included in theontology:After the user created the last sentence of this example, AceWiki detected thatit contradicts the current ontology. The sentence is included in the wiki articlebut the red font indicates that it is not included in the ontology. The user canremove this sentence again, or keep it and try to reassert it later when the restof the ontology has changed.For this approach, it is very important to perform incremental reasoningwhich Pellet supports only partially at the moment. For that reason, AceWikidoes not scale very well. We expect that future reasoners will be able to runmuch faster in such incremental scenarios.3 http://pellet.owldl.com/Not only asserted but also inferred knowledge can be represented in ACE. Atthe moment, AceWiki can show inferred class hierarchies and class memberships.Furthermore, we are working on a query feature for AceWiki. Questions will beformulated in ACE and evaluated by the reasoner:Thus, ACE can be used not only as an ontology- and rule-language, but also asa query-language.5 ConclusionsThe AceWiki prototype shows how ontologies can be managed in a naturalway within a wiki. It demonstrates how semantic wikis using controlled naturallanguage can be expressive and easy to use at the same time. Our previous eval-uation showed that AceWiki is indeed easy to learn. We explained how AceWikiensures — in a very simple way — the consistency of the ontology which is thebasis for other integrated reasoning services.References1. Abraham Bernstein, Esther Kaufmann, Norbert E. Fuchs, June von Bonin. Talkingto the Semantic Web — A Controlled English Query Interface for Ontologies. Proc.14th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, 20042. Norbert E. Fuchs, Kaarel Kaljurand, Gerold Schneider. Attempto ControlledEnglish Meets the Challenges of Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, Inter-operability and User Interfaces. Proc. 19th International FLAIRS Conference(FLAIRS’2006), 20063. Kaarel Kaljurand. Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language. PhDthesis, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Tartu, 20074. Tobias Kuhn, Lo¨ıc Royer, Norbert E. Fuchs, Michael Schroeder. Improving TextMining with Controlled Natural Language: A Case Study for Protein Interactions.Proc. Third International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2006(DILS’06), Springer, 20065. Tobias Kuhn. AceRules: Executing Rules in Controlled Natural Language. Proc.First International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR2007),Springer, 20076. Tobias Kuhn. AceWiki: A Natural and Expressive Semantic Wiki. Proc. of Seman-tic Web User Interaction at CHI 2008: Exploring HCI Challenges, CEUR Work-shop Proceedings, 20087. Katharina Siorpaes, Martin Hepp. myOntology: The Marriage of Ontology Engi-neering and Collective Intelligence. Proc. Bridging the Gap between Semantic Weband Web 2.0, 2007

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AceWiki: Collaborative Ontology Management in Controlled Natural Language

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