An Aspect-Oriented Visual Ontology Editor with Edit-Time Consistency Checking

Semantic computing relies on knowledge. Ontologies are a most common means for knowledge representation and they are widely used in numerous semantic applications. While ontologies are both useful and easy-to-use, they are not easy to build and edit. Ontologies can represent complex real-world domains and concepts, much like a code in a modern programming language. Also, much like program code, descriptions easily become hard to read and complex to edit as elements' semantics are highly interconnected. Unlike modern code editors, most ontology editors do not come with edit time consistency checking and highlighting for inconsistent inputs. This paper introduces an ontology editor that incorporates edittime consistency checking for a subset of OWL Lite constraints. The editor also borrows the idea of aspect-oriented editing from software engineering in that it allows for editing and visualizing arbitrary subsets of an ontologies elements and connections with contextually meaningful names (e.g. Superman in one aspect is Clark Kent in another). The ontology itself is represented in an editable visual language that covers all semantic aspects of OWL Lite. Non-semantic information such as versioning can be edited in a text-based manner.