CAL2OWL: Direct Translation from CAL to OWL for Ontology Authoring

Abstract

Due to the difficulty of authoring the Web Ontology Language (OWL) by ontology engineers and domain experts with little or no engineering experience, the first Controlled Arabic Language (CAL) was proposed to ease ontology authoring by Arab experts. However, the CAL tool is based on Rabbit to OWL Ontology Language (ROO), meaning that CAL ontologies must be translated to Rabbit before being ultimately translated to OWL, which is a slow and inflexible process. The slowness is due to the intermediate translation step, and the inflexibility is due to the coupling between CAL and Rabbit, which prevents modifying and/or extending CAL statements. This research presents the CAL2OWL ontology authoring tool that has been designed to support CAL by translating ontologies from CAL to OWL directly without passing through Rabbit, making it faster and more flexible. We show how to use CAL2OWL to generate a quite complex Umrah ontology using relatively simple CAL statements and also show equivalent complex OWL statements that would have been written otherwise. A System Usability Scale (SUS) usability test demonstrated that CAL2OWL is also highly usable.