Controlled Arabic Language for Authoring Ontologies

Abstract

Due to the difficulty of authoring 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 for Arab experts. However, the CAL tool is based on Rabbit to OWL Ontology language (ROO), meaning that ontologies must be translated to Rabbit before being ultimately translated to OWL, which is a slow and inflexible process. This research proposes utilizing 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 complex Umrah ontology using relatively simple CAL statements and showing equivalent complex OWL statements that would have been written otherwise.