- The MappingMaster plugin for the Prot´eg´e 3.4 ontology editor is a more flexible tool for transforming arbitrary spreadsheet data into OWL. MappingMaster moves away from the row centric view of spreadsheets and has an expressive macro language called M2[15,14] that can handle non-uniform and complex spreadsheets. M2combines a macro language for referring to cells in a spreadsheet with a human readable syntax for generating OWL expressions called the Manchester OWL Syntax [10]. MappingMaster and M2 are primarily designed for the transformation of spreadsheet data to OWL,
but provides little in the way of support for populating and validating the spreadsheet data.

- The Ontology Pre-Processing Language (OPPL) [6,11] (version 2) is a scripting language similar to M2. OPPL 2 is also Manchester OWL Syntax based and allows for the manipulation of OWL ontologies at the axiom level. OPPL
2 has support for the use of variables and the addition and removal of logical axioms from an ontology. OPPL 2 is a powerful scripting language for OWL and a user interface is provided via the OPPL plugin for Prot´eg´e 4.0.

OPPL, however, does not currently support working with tabular data and is decoupled from any knowledge gathering.

- The MatrixPlugin for Prot´eg´e 4.0 allows users to specify simple OWL patterns in a tabular interface that can be used to populate repeating patterns with existing concepts from an ontology. This plugin is useful for ontology developers that have repetitive patterns to instantiate, and has the added benefit of cell validation and auto-completion at the point of data entry.

The Matrix plugin is limited by the type of patterns that can be expressed along with the fact that it is tightly integrated with the Prot´eg´e interface, therefore, not suitable for all users. It does, however, combine knowledge gathering and axiom generation.

## 1.2 Requirements

All of the previous tools developed in this area tend to focus on the transformation from the template to the ontology. They provide little or no support for populating and validating template content. Furthermore, tools like ExcelImporter, OPPL and MappingMaster are integrated into the ontology development tool, so they are aimed at users that are already familiar with ontology development.

A table based tool for ontology authoring should shield the user from the underlying ontology and help guide the user when populating the template. Providing validation at the time of authorship should significantly reduce the amount of time required to debug and process the data captured in the spreadsheet. Here we list some key requirements for an ontology based table editor:
1. Concepts may be described in terms of other concepts from other ontologies.

In setting up Populous the users must be able to load and browse ontologies.

2. The contents in the column of a table need to be restricted to concepts from imported ontologies, or parts of imported ontologies.