A Vision for Diagrammatic Ontology Engineering

Date: June 27, 2014

Speakers: Gem Stapleton and Jim Burton, University of Brighton, UK

Abstract

Recently there has been considerable interests in ontology engineering, not least because of the rise of the semantic web. Many areas benefit from the development of ontologies, including biology, geography and medicine. However, in part due to the large variety of domains where ontologies are of use, not all stakeholders are fluent in the use of the symbolic (mathematical) notations with which ontologies are defined. These notations include description logic and OWL. This inaccessibility is recognised by Rector et al.: “Understanding the logical meaning of any description logic or similar formalism is difficult for most people, and OWL-DL is no exception.” Warren et al. back this insight up with an empirical study of the most commonly used OWL constructs, including class subsumption, disjointness and equivalence alongside All Values From and other property restrictions. They found that “despite training, users are prone to certain misconceptions” and they observed that “one-third of [participants] commented on the value of drawing a diagram … In the context of [description logics], diagrams offer a strategy to overcome misconceptions and generally support reasoning.” Our ambition is to address this major shortcoming of symbolic notations by providing a diagrammatic alternative. In this talk, we will outline our current work and vision for diagrammatic ontology engineering. We have already proposed concept diagrams as a potential notation for ontology engineering and they are a formal diagrammatic logic. In addition, we have proposed a set of diagrammatic patterns that allow concept diagrams to be readily used by ontology engineers for common OWL constructs. Future work includes extending this set of patterns to allow a large variety of OWL constructs to be readily visualized using diagrams as well as providing mechanisms to allow OWL/DL and concept diagrams to be used in tandem, seamlessly integrating the two paradigms.