Fluent Editor and Controlled Natural Language in Ontology Development

Abstract

Ontologies facilitate concise communication across applications and people, by means of precisely defined terms that provide a shared and common understanding. However, typically, the development of an ontology entails the commitment of multiple users and requires significant skills and knowledge in this area. To face this problem, in this paper we discuss the features and capabilities of Fluent Editor and, based on a real-life example, present the properties of Controlled Natural Language (CNL). Firstly, the editor is designed to be user-friendly and is customized with a ribbon and self-extensible windows. Secondly, it actively supports the user when typing sentences by providing built-in features such as syntax highlighting, a hint box, a predicted word list, marking errors, parsing and serializing, and reformatting and validating options. Thirdly, the built-in graphics engine produces high quality images of ontology diagrams, represented on a 2-D view-port, and easy to manipulate and change. Fourthly, CNL allows users with even basic English skills to start typing sentences with little or no preliminary effort in defining terms and the relations between them, and prevents the user from entering any grammatically or morphologically incorrect sentence. The evidenced success of the development of ontologies in many business areas, using CNL aided by Fluent Editor on the one hand, and results from similar studies documented in the literature on the other, seem to indicate that together the language and the tool form a mature approach to developing and maintaining complex information structures. In this case, there is substantial evidence to indicate that the adoption of the above technologies to teach the foundations of knowledge engineering covering artificial intelligence applications, ought to be considered as a good choice also for classroom settings.