Using OWL Annotation in Fluent Editor

OWL Annotations together with SKOS and DcTerms form a widely used Thesaurus standard that help the ontology modeler to give meaningful names to elements of the ontology or to relates elements in various ontology. In the latest release of Fluent Editor, we have introduced the possibility to add, remove and modify OWL annotations with full support for SKOS and DcTerms. As always this has been implemented thinking of the usability over everything. 

All actions related to the annotations are reachable from the Annotation tab that was added in the right column of the Fluent Editor window. To see how to use annotations in Fluent Editor,you can open the Book Reference template. To see the template, click on File -> New  and then Book Reference.

After loading the file, you will see that in the taxonomy tree an icon appeared on the right of some of the elements. This icon means that an annotation has been found (locally or from the reference). 

To see the annotation associated to this element you have two ways:

• right click on one of the element in the taxonomy tree and click Show Annotations.
• place the cursor in the editor on the element for which you want to see the annotations and click in the Annotation tab in the right column.

When annotations are present, Fluent Editor will load them automatically and organize them using the language defined in the annotation. To see annotations in another language, just click in the language selector and choose the language you want. 

In the Annotation window you have at the right of each annotation type a + icon. If you click this icon, it will be possible to enter a new value for this annotation type. The X button near each annotation value can be used to remove this value from the annotations. Clearly annotations that are defined in a reference cannot be removed.

For adding a new language, you can click the Add button on the right of the language selector. 

you will then see a window

in which you can choose the language to add. After clicking Add, the language will be available to all other elements inside Fluent Editor.

To add a new annotation type you just need to start typing in the text box and the most commonly used annotations type will be proposed (from Skos, Dct Terms, Rdfs or Owl). 

By pressing enter, the annotation type will be added to the annotation list with a blank value. 

You can then add an annotation value and this will be saved automatically. The content of the annotation is modifiable only if the annotation is defined locally, otherwise its background will be red and the annotation content cannot be modified.

Clearly, as everything in Fluent Editor, all changes that you make on the annotations in your ontology, will be exportable to OWL.

In this first implementation we support only annnotations about ontology entities (concepts, instances, roles and attributes). We are working to support also annotations on statements and statements about annotations but we still need to find an intuitive OCNL implementation for annotation statements. Any suggestion is welcome!

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If you want to learn more about Fluent Editor 2014 R2, visit this link.

*) FluentEditor 2014 R2, ontology editor, is a comprehensive tool for editing and manipulating complex ontologies that uses Controlled Natural Language. Fluent editor provides one with a more suitable for human users alternative to XML-based OWL editors. It's main feature is the usage of Controlled English as a knowledge modeling language. Supported via Predictive Editor, it prohibits user from entering any sentence that is grammatically or morphologically incorrect and actively helps the user during sentence writing.