3. To improve human comprehension the concept should be rendered using only the URI fragment, or optionally a human readable label from the ontology.

4. Each time a concept is added to a cell within the table Populous needs to check that the concept is valid according to the constraints resulting from requirement 2.

5. A cell might have multiple values; for example, when the concept being described has multiple parts.

6. Users should be free to suggest new concepts when an appropriate concept is not available.

## 2 Populous

Populous is an extension of RightField[21]; RightField is for creating Excel documents that contain ontology based restrictions on spreadsheets content. RightField enables users to upload Excel spreadsheets, along with ontologies from their local file systems, or from the BioPortal [13] (a repository of biological ontologies available at http://bioportal.bioontology.org). RightField supports OWL, OBO and RDFS ontologies. Using RightField, individual cells, or whole columns or rows can be marked with the required ranges of ontology terms. For example, they could include all subclasses from a chosen class, direct subclasses only, all individuals, or only direct individuals. Each spreadsheet can be annotated with terms from multiple ontologies. RightField is primarily designed for generating spreadsheet templates for data annotation; Populous extends RightField to support knowledge gathering and ontology generation.

Populous and RightField are both open source cross platform Java application. They use the Apache-POI 7for interacting with Microsoft documents and manipulating Excel spreadsheets. Populous is available for download from here http://www.e-lico.eu/populous.

Requirement 1 is already addressed using RightField functionality to upload both OWL and OBO ontologies. In order to better serve the life science community, users can also browse and load ontologies directly from BioPortal. Once the ontologies are loaded they are classified by a reasoner and the basic class hierarchy can be viewed.

Requirement 2 is met by the ability to select terms from the ontology to create validation sets. A data validation restricts the set of values that are valid for a particular cell in the table. Validations can span multiple rows and columns and be composed of classes, properties or individuals from the ontology. These data validations are stored in hidden worksheets along with additional information such as the full URI for the term, a label and the source ontology URI. These templates can also be exported as Microsoft Excel documents, which include the data validations on cells.

We address requirement 3 by allowing users to populate cells using ontology labels. Once data has been entered the default will be to render the ontology term using its label; if no label is specified the URI fragment is used. RightField 7http://poi.apache.org