OntoVerbal: a Generic Tool and Practical Application to SNOMED CT
This addresses the challenge for ontology developers and users who need clearer understanding of complex ontologies, but it is incremental as it builds on existing natural language generation techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of making ontology content more transparent by developing OntoVerbal, a tool that uses natural language generation to produce paragraph-sized textual descriptions of ontology classes in OWL. The result is that OntoVerbal, when applied to SNOMED CT, provides coherent, well-structured, and accurate descriptions.
Ontology development is a non-trivial task requiring expertise in the chosen ontological language. We propose a method for making the content of ontologies more transparent by presenting, through the use of natural language generation, naturalistic descriptions of ontology classes as textual paragraphs. The method has been implemented in a proof-of- concept system, OntoVerbal, that automatically generates paragraph-sized textual descriptions of ontological classes expressed in OWL. OntoVerbal has been applied to ontologies that can be loaded into Protégé and been evaluated with SNOMED CT, showing that it provides coherent, well-structured and accurate textual descriptions of ontology classes.