ROO: A Tool to Assist Domain Experts with Ontology Construction

The time and effort required to create ontological structures is one of the major reasons for the reluctance of large organisations and businesses to utilise Semantic Web (SW) technologies. This is aggravated by the fact that most ontology construction tools are suited for knowledge engineers who may lack the necessary domain expertise to create the relevant ontologies. This can hinder the ontology construction process and impair the quality of the resultant ontology. There is an urgent need for intuitive tools which facilitate domain experts’ involvement in the ontology construction process and are derived from existing practical experiences. We have developed a novel tool for supporting domain experts with little or no knowledge engineering experience to build conceptual ontologies, which is drawn upon the experience in creating topographic ontologies at Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s mapping agency. The distinctive characteristics of our approach are: (i) catering for the needs of domain experts without knowledge engineering skills but also enabling users with experience in ontology development to inspect and edit the resultant ontology; (ii) exploiting techniques from intelligent user interfaces to assist the ontology construction process by following an ontology authoring methodology (the current implementation follows the methodology used at Ordnance Survey for developing several large ontologies with the active involvement of domain experts [2]); (iii) providing an intuitive interface to enter knowledge constructs in a controlled language (CL), Rabbit1, designed to meet the needs of domain experts and compliant with OWL 1.1 [1]. The tool, called ROO (Rabbit to OWL Ontology authoring) is developed within the Confluence project and is distributed as open source2.