designing user interfaces to minimise common errors in ontology development

2nd Sept 2004 UK e-Science all hands meeting 1

Designing User Interfaces to Minimise Common Errors

in Ontology Development

Alan Rector, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge, Jeremy Rogers, Holger Knublauch, Robert Stevens, Hai Wang, Chris Wroe

Funded by

The CO-ODE and HyOntUse projects

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Who Are WeWorking With?

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What’s This Talk About?

• Problems in building ontologies in OWL

• Tools to begin addressing the problems

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What’s The Problem?

is

difficult

Building Ontologies

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Why?

• Not everyone can afford to employ an ontologist

• XML/RDF/OWL is not much fun to write by hand

• DL languages like OWL often don’t behave as expected

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Behave as Expected?

• OWL does not make the Unique Name Assumption

• DLs use Open World Reasoning

• Domain and Range as axioms

• Only logicians like symbols like and • Primitive vs Defined classes

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What’s The Problem?

is

difficult

without help!

Building Ontologies

in OWL VERY

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WE WANTTO

HELP

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• Tutorials and courses run with OWL and DAML+OIL

• Existing tools developed by Manchester and Stanford (OilEd & Protégé)

• Lots of ontology building experience• High level of involvement in language

standards being created• In house DL expertise

Why Should We(of all people) Help?

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How Can We Help?

1) Provide easy access to common tasks

2) Make correct actions the default

3) Simplify complex tasks

4) Improve presentation

5) Make it easy to catch mistakes

By making tools which:

Encourage Good Modelling

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+ =

What Are We Doing?

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1. Access to Common Tasks:

Disjointness

• Problem: Explicit assertion of disjointness required

• Aim: Make whole primitive tree disjoint• Common task: Make all siblings disjoint• Solutions:

– Make all subclasses disjoint action– Make all siblings disjoint button– Create group of classes wizard

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1. Access to Common Tasks:

Disjointness

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2. Default Actions:

Universal Restrictions

• Problem: Universal restrictions used incorrectly

• Common task: Create a set of existential restrictions and then close

• Solutions:– Create existential restriction by default– Closure action abstracts away universal restr.– Warn when universal restr. used inappropriately

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2. Default Actions:

Universal Restrictions

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3. Complex tasks:

Creating Patterns

• Problem: Modelling practice not established so its easy to omit steps in creating patterns

• Aim: Create patterns in a consistent manner• Solutions:

– Supporting work by W3C Semantic Web Best Practice Working Party

– Wizards (eg Value Partitions)– Covering Axioms action

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3. Complex tasks:

Creating Patterns

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4. Improve Visualisation:

Defined Classes

• Problem: Class definition and effects of classification are hard to visualise

• Aim: Create defined classes and allow polyheirarchies to be computed automatically

• Solutions:– Clear distinctions between restrictions defining a

class and those simply describing it– Improved visualisation to navigate the model

before and after classification

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4. Improve Visualisation:

Defined Classes

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4. Improve Visualisation:

Defined Classes

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5. Catching Mistakes:

Timebombs

• Problem: Finding the reasons for inconsistencies or misclassification is hard

• Aim: Check that model fits in with intent of modeller

• Solutions:– Tests framework– Warnings during editing of possible bad practice– Debugging view

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5. Catching Mistakes:

Timebombs

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Is That All?

• Improved Reasoner support

• Support for larger ontologies

• Hiding away workarounds for language limitations

• Cut-down editing environment

• More wizards (pattern support)

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What If You Still Can’tUse It?

Get the Protégé OWL tutorial

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What Was All That?

• We are contributing to the successful Protégé OWL plugin

• We are developing further tools

• The aim of the tools is to make ontology development easier

• We have also developed tutorials and other community support

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How Do You Contribute?

• Ontologies: Applications, Requirements and Tools BoF, 4:20pm Room 2

• CO-ODE forum

(http://www.co-ode.org/forum)

• Protégé OWL mailing list

(http://protege.stanford.edu)

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One Final Question…

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…Any Questions?