User-friendly ontology authoring using a controlled language

In recent years, following the rapid development in the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management research, ontologies have become more in demand in Natural Language Processing. An increasing number of systems use ontologies either internally, for modelling the domain of the application, or as data structures that hold the output resulting from the work of the system, in the form of knowledge bases. While there are many ontology editing tools aimed at expert users, there are very few which are accessible to users wishing to create simple structures without delving into the intricacies of knowledge representation languages. The approach described in this paper allows users to create and edit ontologies simply by using a restricted version of the English language. The controlled language described within is based on an open vocabulary and a restricted set of grammatical constructs. Sentences written in this language unambiguously map into a number of knowledge representation formats including OWL and RDF-S to allow round-trip ontology management.