HyOntUse: Hybrid User Oriented to Ontology Tools

HyOntUse was an EPSRC funded research project.

Brief Description

Metadata and ontologies are widely identified as key technologies for E-Science. However, the ontologies for each domain need to be developed and 'owned' by the experts in that domain. Although they provide greatly increased power, domain experts often find logic based languages such as OWL (formerly DAML+OIL) unintuitive and difficult to use. We address two parts of this problem a) Presenting the ontology in ways which domain users find easy to understand, develop, and maintain; and b) providing tools to help them understand when the inferences provided by the logic engine do not their expectations - i.e. to debug the ontology. No complete formal solution is known for either problem at this time for the tableaux reasoners which underpin OWL. Therefore we propose a heuristic approach.