User and Developer Interaction with Editable and Readable Ontologies

The process of building ontologies is a difficult task that involves collaboration between ontology developers and domain experts and requires an ongoing interaction between them. This collaboration is made more difficult, because they tend to use different tool sets, which can hamper this interaction. In this paper, we propose to decrease this distance between domain experts and ontology developers by creating more readable forms of ontologies, and further to enable editing in normal office environments. Building on a programmatic ontology development environment, such as Tawny-OWL, we are now able to generate these readable/editable from the raw ontological source and its embedded comments. We have this translation to HTML for reading; this environment provides rich hyperlinking as well as active features such as hiding the source code in favour of comments. We are now working on translation to a Word document that also enables editing. Taken together this should provide a significant new route for collaboration between the ontologist and domain specialist.