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 automatically
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

Kuhn, Tobias

English

arXiv

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 automatically 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

Kuhn, T

ZORA

University of ZurichZurich Open Repository and ArchiveWinterthurerstr. 190CH-8057 Zurichhttp://www.zora.uzh.chYear: 2008Combining semantic wikis and controlled natural languageKuhn, TKuhn, T. Combining semantic wikis and controlled natural language. In: 7th International Semantic WebConference (ISWC 2008), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26 October 2008 - 30 October 2008.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:7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26 October 2008 - 30 October2008.Kuhn, T. Combining semantic wikis and controlled natural language. In: 7th International Semantic WebConference (ISWC 2008), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26 October 2008 - 30 October 2008.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:7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26 October 2008 - 30 October2008.Combining semantic wikis and controlled natural languageAbstractWe demonstrate AceWiki that is a semantic wiki using the controlled natural language AttemptoControlled English (ACE). The goal is to enable easy creation and modification of ontologies throughthe web. Texts in ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic and other languages, forexample OWL. Previous evaluation showed that ordinary people are able to use AceWiki without beinginstructed.Combining Semantic Wikis andControlled Natural LanguageTobias KuhnDepartment of InformaticsUniversity of Zurich, Switzerlandtkuhn@ifi.uzh.chABSTRACTWe demonstrate AceWiki that is a semantic wiki using thecontrolled natural language Attempto Controlled English(ACE). The goal is to enable easy creation and modificationof 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 ordinarypeople are able to use AceWiki without being instructed.KeywordsControlled Natural Language, Attempto Controlled English(ACE), Semantic Web, Semantic Wiki, AceWiki, Ontology1. INTRODUCTIONMost of the tasks the Semantic Web is eventually supposedto fulfill rely on the availability of ontologies. However, thecreation and maintenance of ontologies is difficult because anumber of domain experts — most of which are not familiarwith formal languages — have to agree on a conceptualiza-tion of the respective domain. For that reason, it is crucialfor the future of the Semantic Web to provide tools thatmake the creation of ontologies easy for everybody.AceWiki1 tackles this problem by combining semantic wikiswith controlled natural language. The goal of AceWiki is toenable ordinary people with no background in formal lan-guages to create expressive ontologies in a collaborative andintuitive way without the need of installing an application.2. BACKGROUNDThere are several existing semantic wiki systems, see e.g.[3] for a brief survey. Unfortunately, most of those wikis donot support expressive ontology languages in a general way.Furthermore, they are often hard to understand for peoplewho 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 ofEnglish, ACE looks completely natural. Restrictions of thesyntax and the definition of a small set of interpretation rulesmake it a formal language that is automatically translatableinto first-order logic. ACE covers a large part of natural En-glish: singular and plural noun phrases, active and passivevoice, relative phrases, anaphoric references, existential anduniversal quantifiers, negation, and much more.1See [3], [4], and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki2See [1] and http://attempto.ifi.uzh.chFigure 1: A screenshot of the predictive editor ofAceWiki. The fragment “Every area is” has alreadybeen entered and now the editor shows all possibil-ities to continue the sentence.ACE has been used as a natural language front-end to OWLwith a bidirectional mapping of ACE to OWL [2]. AceWikiuses this for translating ACE sentences into OWL. The samework also introduces a Prote´ge´ plugin called “ACE View”which enables to manage ontologies in ACE within the Pro-te´ge´ environment.3. SYSTEMIn 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”) areinterpreted as binary relations. Using those words togetherwith the predefined function words of ACE (e.g. “a”, “every”,“if”, “then”, “and”, “not”, “is”, “that”), ontological statementsare expressed as ACE sentences:As those examples show, the formal statements are easilyreadable and understandable by any English speaking per-son. In order to enable easy creation and modification ofACE sentences, AceWiki integrates a predictive editor thatshows step-by-step the words that are syntactically possi-Figure 2: A screenshot of the web interface ofAceWiki showing the wiki article for the class “con-tinent”.ble at a given position in the sentence. Figure 1 shows ascreenshot of this editor.Each of the ontological entities gets its own wiki article.Figure 2 shows an example. Every article consist of ACEsentences most of which can be translated into OWL, e.g:ACE is more expressive than OWL, and thus we can writestatements that go beyond the semantic expressivity of OWL(e.g. rule-like statements). Such statements are marked witha red triangle (and are currently ignored by the reasoner):Furthermore, questions can be used to query the knowledgebase, e.g:Thus, ACE is an ontology language, a rule language, and aquery 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 itscreation — whether it would introduce a contradiction. Ifthis 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 to infer the class memberships ofindividuals. The results are presented in ACE again:The same is done for class hierarchies:This shows that not only asserted but also inferred knowl-edge is represented in ACE. Finally, the reasoner is also usedto answer questions:In general, we can say that AceWiki communicates with theusers on a very natural level. No knowledge about formallanguages is required to deal with AceWiki.4. EVALUATIONIn our previous work [3], we conducted a user experimentthat showed that ordinary people with no background inlogic and ontologies are able to deal with AceWiki. The par-ticipants — without being instructed how to interact withthe interface — were asked to add knowledge to AceWiki.About 80% of the created sentences were correct and sen-sible. Remarkably, more than 60% of those sentences werecomplex in the sense that they contained an implication ora negation.5. CONCLUSIONSAceWiki shows how ontologies can be created and modifiedin a natural way within a wiki. It demonstrates how seman-tic wikis using controlled natural language can be expressiveand easy to use at the same time. Our previous evaluationshowed that AceWiki is indeed easy to learn.6. REFERENCES[1] Norbert E. Fuchs, Kaarel Kaljurand, Tobias Kuhn.Attempto Controlled English for KnowledgeRepresentation. Reasoning Web, Fourth InternationalSummer School, Springer, 2008[2] Kaarel Kaljurand. Attempto Controlled English as aSemantic Web Language. PhD thesis, Faculty ofMathematics and Computer Science, University ofTartu, 2007[3] Tobias Kuhn. AceWiki: A Natural and ExpressiveSemantic Wiki. Proc. of Semantic Web UserInteraction at CHI 2008: Exploring HCI Challenges,CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2008[4] Tobias Kuhn. AceWiki: Collaborative OntologyManagement in Controlled Natural Language. Proc. ofthe 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop, CEUR WorkshopProceedings, 2008

Combining semantic wikis and controlled natural language

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.142.9435

Combining Semantic Wikis and Controlled Natural Language

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ZORA