Populous: A tool for populating ontology templates

TL;DR

Populous is a user-friendly tool that simplifies the process of gathering and populating ontology content by providing a table-based interface, enabling efficient mass production of ontology data without requiring deep ontological expertise.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to knowledge gathering in ontology development by separating content collection from conceptualization and authoring environments.

Findings

Enables straightforward knowledge gathering for ontologies.

Supports mass production of ontology content.

Separates knowledge collection from ontology conceptualization.

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.