erate different ontological representations of the same data. The KUPO is also being used to link data in an RDF store to support the KUP KB, where only limited support for OWL inferences is possible. By developing a different set of patterns we could generate a simpler version of the KUP ontology from the same Populous data for use in such an application. This again highlights an added benefit of separating the pattern from its population.

OPPL provides an expressive language for generating OWL patterns. OPPL's support for variables make mapping single columns from tabular data to variables convenient. The built in macros means we can create abstract pattern where the axioms can be generated dynamically depending on the number of values stored in a variable. Populous is currently limited to working with uniform spreadsheets and assumes a row-per-entity paradigm, where single columns map to a particular variable. This structure keeps the template simple and should cover the majority of use cases for populating an ontology in this way. The extension to support multi-values per cell offers some additional flexibility over existing spreadsheet based approaches. In order to accommodate more complex spreadsheets we plan to extend Populous to support more complex mappings from columns to spreadsheets. We are also exploring integrating the M2language from MappingMaster directly into Populous, we note that templates created in Populous can already be exported as Excel document and loaded into MappingMaster for transformation should the user desire.

Populous offers a means of creating ontology content without the use of a standard ontology development tool. Just as data-entry tools exist for populating databases, so we also need such tools for populating ontologies. It is possible to separate knowledge gathering from conceptualisation and axiomatisation and Populous is one means of achieving this goal. Such a separation offers flexibility and simple form fill-in style of knowledge gathering that should make generation of axiomatically rich ontologies increasingly straight-forward.

Acknowledgements: We kindly acknowledge Mikel Ega˜na Aranguren for advice, requirements and testing Populous. This work is funded by the e-LICO
project—EU/FP7/ICT-2007.4.4 and by SysMO-DB - BBSRC grant BBG0102181.

## References
