What if ...?Chris Mellish, Jeff Pan, Kees van Deemter, Yuan Ren, Artemis Parvizi, University of Aberdeen

Robert Stevens, Caroline Jay, Markel Vigo,University of Manchester

Ontology Authoring is Hard“substantial demand for text-based interaction”“translation of a conceptual model into a DL-style formalism [can be] a source of problems” (Dzabor 06)

Elements of a Solution?

?

Responsive reasoning

Controlled language input (axiom level)

Understanding of the process (?)

Hypotheses

• Users don’t know what they are doing, need to find out• Explicit and implicit “what if...?” questions

• But there may be infinitely many answers• Need to know what is relevant

• Relevance depends on the context• What are they trying to do? Interested in?

Authoring as DialogueU1: What does this say about Disclosure Rights?S1: A Disclosure Right is a Moral Right. It can only have a Person as an agent. It has exactly one essence, which must be a Work. . . .U2: I want a Moral Right to be able to have a date.S2: There is currently no date property.U3: What if I import timeframe.owl?S3: That is consistent. There is now a date property.U4: What if a Moral Right must have exactly one date?S4: That implies that Attribution Rights and Integrity Rights must have exactly one date.U5: Why?S5: Because these are kinds of Moral Rights.

How it might look...