# Populous: A Tool For Populating Templates For Owl Ontologies

Simon Jupp 1, Matthew Horridge 1, Luigi Iannone 1, Julie Klein 2, Stuart Owen 1, Joost Schanstra 2, Robert Stevens 1, and Katy Wolstencroft 1 1 School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
2Institut National de la Sant´e et de la Recherche M´edicale, Toulouse, France Abstract. We present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to populate an ontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in its form, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation. Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns are constrained to take values from particular ontologies; the user can select a concept from an ontology via its meaningful label to give a value for a given entity attribute. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be used to automatically generate the ontology's content. Populous's contribution is in the knowledge gathering stage of ontology development. It separates knowledge gathering from the conceptualisation and also separates the user from the standard ontology authoring environments. As a result, Populous can allow knowledge to be gathered in a straight-forward manner that can then be used to do mass production of ontology content.

Keywords: Ontology, OWL, Spreadsheet, Template

## 1 Introduction

Ontologies are being developed to provide controlled vocabularies for the annotation of life science data. Annotating data with ontologies adds semantics to the data that can facilitate data integration and enrich data analysis[18], [5],
[3]. For ontologies to have a faithful representation of a domain, experts from that domain must have input to the authoring process. There are barriers that prevent domain experts engaging in an ontology's development; in particular, the semantics of an ontology language, or the intricacies of the authoring tools. To address this issue we have developed Populous that allows users to contribute their knowledge by populating simple templates that are then transformed to statements in the underlying representation language.

When designing an ontology it is often the case that repeating patterns occur in the modelling. These patterns can be abstracted from the ontology and used to specify simple templates that could be populated by domain experts [7,6,2]. As an example of a pattern, consider an ontology about cells; eukaryotic cells can be classified as being either anucleate, mono-nucleate, binucleate or multinucleate.

arXiv:1012.1745v1 [cs.AI] 8 Dec 2010