Populous: A tool for populating ontology templates

Abstract

We present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to populate anontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in itsform, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation.Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns areconstrained to take values from particular ontologies; the user can select aconcept from an ontology via its meaningful label to give a value for a givenentity attribute. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be usedto automatically generate the ontology's content. Populous's contribution is inthe knowledge gathering stage of ontology development. It separates knowledgegathering from the conceptualisation and also separates the user from thestandard ontology authoring environments. As a result, Populous can allowknowledge to be gathered in a straight-forward manner that can then be used todo mass production of ontology content