OWL for the Masses: From Structured OWL to Unstructured Technically-Neutral Natural Language

摘要

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is one of the fundamental blocks for realizing the Semantic Web vision, since it allows to represent probably the most difficult component of the latter; knowledge regarding the concepts of domain of discourse, i.e. ontologies. Unfortunately, its expressive power goes in hand with a rather verbose syntax, difficult to be understood by non-technical users, and thus leading to difficulties in validation and verification of the represented knowledge. A translation tool from OWL to some form of natural language could significantly assist users towards such tasks. Such a tool requires correctly interpreting the ontology constructs, representing highly nested ontologies, and forming logical sentences. This paper presents an innovative approach to directly translating RDF/XML based structured ontology into error free concise natural language text akin to English.