OWL verbalizer is a tool that converts an OWL ontology into an Attempto Controlled English (ACE) text.
It can handle complex OWL formulas such as
man
and (not (own some car))
and (own some bike)
SubClassOf inverse (likes) some ({Mary})
by turning them into natural English sentences such as:
Every man
that owns a bike
and
that does not own a car
is liked by Mary .
This conversion is designed to be reversible, i.e. one can convert the ACE representation back into OWL so that no loss in meaning occurs. For more of the theory and design choices behind the verbalization read section 5.6 Verbalizing OWL in ACE of
Kaarel Kaljurand. Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language. PhD thesis, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Tartu, 2007. http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/pubs/papers/phd_kaljurand.pdf
For a demo visit the OWL verbalizer demo page.
OWL verbalizer is implemented in SWI-Prolog. It offers a command-line front-end and can also be run as an HTTP server. The following example demonstrates launching the server and using it to verbalize an OWL/XML ontology from a remote repository.
$ ./owl_to_ace.exe -httpserver -port 5123 &
$ curl 'http://mowl-power.cs.man.ac.uk:8080/converter/convert?
ontology=http://protege.stanford.edu/ontologies/pizza/pizza.owl&format=OWL/XML'
| curl -F "xml=<-" http://localhost:5123
The resulting ACE text will appear in STDOUT.
The OWL verbalizer takes its input in OWL 2 XML and produces an output in a fragment of Attempto Controlled English (ACE).
Note that the input must be in OWL 2 XML (http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-xml-serialization/). No RDF-based format is supported as input. You can convert OWL RDF/XML into OWL 2 XML using the OWL-API v3 (http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/), e.g. via the online tool http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/converter/ or via Protege 4.1 (http://protege.stanford.edu/).
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Ontology
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xml:base="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">
<Prefix name="" IRI="http://www.example.org/test#"/>
<SubClassOf>
<ObjectIntersectionOf>
<Class abbreviatedIRI=":man"/>
<ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
<ObjectProperty abbreviatedIRI=":own"/>
<Class abbreviatedIRI=":bike"/>
</ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
<ObjectComplementOf>
<ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
<ObjectProperty abbreviatedIRI=":own"/>
<Class abbreviatedIRI=":car"/>
</ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
</ObjectComplementOf>
</ObjectIntersectionOf>
<ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
<ObjectInverseOf>
<ObjectProperty abbreviatedIRI=":like"/>
</ObjectInverseOf>
<ObjectOneOf>
<NamedIndividual abbreviatedIRI=":Mary"/>
</ObjectOneOf>
</ObjectSomeValuesFrom>
</SubClassOf>
</Ontology>
In ace-format:
Every man that own a bike and that does not own a car is like by Mary.
In csv-format:
ignored Prefix(,http://www.example.org/test#)
f Every
cn_sg http://www.example.org/test#man
f that
tv_sg http://www.example.org/test#own
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/test#bike
f and
f that
f does
f not
tv_pl http://www.example.org/test#own
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/test#car
f is
tv_vbg http://www.example.org/test#like
f by
pn_sg http://www.example.org/test#Mary
f .
The OWL verbalizer depends on a reasonably recent version of SWI-Prolog
(http://www.swi-prolog.org/), e.g. 5.10 or higher.
SWI-Prolog must be installed together with the packages
clib, sgml, and http.
See also: docs/installing_swipl_on_linux.txt.
First, make sure that the SWI-Prolog executable is on the PATH,
i.e. that you can execute swipl in any directory.
In order to compile the OWL verbalizer executable, execute:
swipl -O -f owl_to_ace.pl -g "qsave_program('owl_to_ace.exe', [goal(main), toplevel(halt)])." -t halt
or, alternatively, just click on make_exe.bat (on Windows) or
type sh make_exe.sh (on Unix / Linux / MacOS X).
As a result, an EXE-file (the command-line client) is created.
The command-line client takes one obligatory argument: the name of the OWL 2 XML file to be verbalized. In the following example, we are using examples/example.owl as input.
./owl_to_ace.exe -xml examples/example.owl
The output (i.e. the resulting ACE text) is printed to standard output.
Note that this command can be also executed as:
swipl -x owl_to_ace.exe -- -xml examples/example.owl
This you can use on computers where the path to SWI-Prolog is different than the one that you used during building.
If executing the EXE-file results in an "out of stack" error, then increase the stack sizes and recompile.
The OWL verbalizer webservice is launched on the command-line, e.g.:
./owl_to_ace.exe -httpserver -port 5123 -workers 2
A good way to start the service on a Unix command-line is:
nohup swipl -x owl_to_ace.exe -- -httpserver -port 5123 -workers 2 > stdout.txt 2> stderr.txt &
In this case, the service is started in the background,
a start up message is stored in stdout.txt, and possible error messages in stderr.txt.
On Mac OS X, one could use launchctl instead.
As a result, a webserver (SWI HTTP server) is started on port 5123 with 2 worker threads. The optimal number of workers depends on the number of CPUs.
In order to verbalize an ontology,
post the OWL 2 XML document to the server via the argument xml.
Following are some examples of using curl to achieve this.
curl -F "xml=@examples/example.owl" http://localhost:5123
curl -F "xml=<examples/example.owl" http://localhost:5123
cat examples/example.owl | curl -F "xml=<-" http://localhost:5123
curl 'http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/repository/download?ontology=http://www.co-ode.org/ontologies/pizza/pizza.owl&format=OWL/XML' | curl -F "xml=<-" http://localhost:5123
Posting from an HTML page: look at the source code of docs/owl_to_ace.html.
Posting from Java: use the OWL verbalizer Java interface, in directory java/.
The OWL verbalizer maps OWL entity IRIs to ACE content words such that
- OWL individuals map to ACE proper names (PN)
- OWL classes map to ACE common nouns (CN)
- OWL properties map to ACE transitive verbs (TV)
There are 6 morphological categories that determine the surface form of an IRI:
- singular form of a proper name (e.g. John)
- singular form of a common noun (e.g. man)
- plural form of a common noun (e.g. men)
- singular form of a transitive verb (e.g. mans)
- plural form of a transitive verb (e.g. man)
- past participle form a transitive verb (e.g. manned)
The user has full control over the eventual surface forms of the IRIs but has to choose them in terms of the above categories. Furthermore,
- the surface forms must be legal ACE content words (e.g. they should not contain punctuation symbols);
- the mapping of IRIs to surface forms must be bidirectional within the same word class, in order to be able to (if needed) parse the verbalization back into OWL in a semantics preserving way.
It is possible to specify the mapping of IRIs to surface forms using the following annotation properties:
http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#PN_sghttp://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#CN_sghttp://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#CN_plhttp://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#TV_sghttp://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#TV_plhttp://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#TV_vbg
For example, the following axioms state that if the IRI "#man" is used as a plural common noun, then the wordform men must be used by the verbalizer. If, however, it is used as a singular transitive verb, then mans must be used.
<AnnotationAssertion>
<AnnotationProperty IRI="http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#CN_pl"/>
<IRI>#man</IRI>
<Literal datatypeIRI="&xsd;string">men</Literal>
</AnnotationAssertion>
<AnnotationAssertion>
<AnnotationProperty IRI="http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ace_lexicon#TV_sg"/>
<IRI>#man</IRI>
<Literal datatypeIRI="&xsd;string">mans</Literal>
</AnnotationAssertion>
For example, these axioms support the generation of the sentence John mans at most 3 men.
from an axiom that uses the IRI "#man" via punning once as an object property name,
and once as a class name.
If the mapping of an IRI is missing then its fragment is used in the output. The fragment is the part that comes after '#' or the last '/'. Note that this means that different IRIs are not necessarily verbalized as different.
If the output-mode is "csv", then each ACE token is output on a separate line and morphological mappings are left to the user to be applied after the verbalization. An example of csv-output is:
pn_sg http://www.example.org/story.owl#John
f is
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/story.owl#man
f .
f Every
f thing
f that
f is
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/story.owl#apple
f or
f that
f is
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/story.owl#leaf
f is
f a
cn_sg http://www.example.org/story.owl#food
f .
The columns are tab-separated. The first column specifies the type of the token, e.g.
f= function wordqs= quoted stringcomment= commentcn_sg= singular common noun- ...
and the 2nd column contains ACE tokens and OWL IRIs. Empty line denotes axiom borders (each OWL axiom in the input ontology is verbalized by 0 or more ACE sentences).
In this mode the AnnotationAssertions are ignored and IRI fragments are not generated. As a result this mode is about 3x faster.
The API-level access to the OWL verbalizer is only documented with SWI-Prolog's PlDoc.
Provided that you have PlDoc installed (SWI-Prolog package pldoc),
you can view the documentation by:
?- doc_server(8000).
?- [owl_to_ace].
?- doc_browser.
The main entry point to the verbalizer is the module axiom_sentencelist.pl which converts an input OWL axiom (Prolog term in OWL FSS) to a list of ACE sentences (where each sentence is a Prolog list of ACE tokens, where each token is a Prolog atom, number, or unary ground term).
- ACE compliant controlled Latvian for ontology authoring and verbalization
- ACE View — a natural language interface to knowledge engineering
- MoKi: the Enterprise Modelling WiKi uses the OWL verbalizer for the "lightly-structured" presentation of the content