Diagrammatic Ontology Engineering

Ontology engineering involves defining axioms to capture required constraints when modelling a domain of interest. Ontologies arise in many areas, with potentially a diverse range of end users involved in their creation. This leads to the requirement for accessible approaches to ontology engineering, as some stakeholders need not be fluent or trained in symbolic notations such as OWL. This paper summarises concept diagrams and property diagrams which are designed to be an accessible alternative to OWL. The paper reports on two empirical studies, the first of which focuses on how to choose effective concept diagrams for expressing simple OWL axioms. The second study compares these effective diagrams to both OWL and DL, demonstrating that they can bring about significant improvements in task performance for novice users. These results support the incorporation of concept diagrams into ontology engineering tools, such as Prot´eg´e or WebProtege. This is an exciting prospect, allowing more stakeholders to fully engage with the ontology engineering process, leading to more efficiently produced and robust ontologies in the future.