ORM Diagram as an Intermediate Model for OWL Ontology Engineering: Protégé ORM Plugin Implementation

Abstract

OWL2, a widely-used ontology-representation language, is poorly perceived by humans because OWL2 statements have a low level of abstraction. To solve this issue, various OWL2 ontology editors are used, which allow to group statements and represent them using some visual notation. ORM-diagram is a good candidate for an intermediate model for authoring and understanding of OWL2-ontology as Object-Role Modelling notation supports visually distinguishable constructs, has the high expressive capabilities, and implements the node-link paradigm and the attribute-free approach A Protégé plugin allowing to create an ORM2-diagram using the live error checking approach was implemented. The plugin allows us to form a valid object-oriented diagram model in computer memory using a widely known ontology authoring tool Protégé.