Ontologies are widely used in the eld of health-care and life sciences, because of their capability to adapt with such a complex and heterogeneous information. Therefore, the process of ontology construction is important especially with such complex and potentially changeable knowledge; also cooperation between domain specialists and ontology developers is essential, which will improve the reliability and robustness of the ontology overtime. However, tools used by ontology developers are less understood by the domain specialists who use di erent formalisms and tools to represent and manipulate their data. As developing ontologies is a collaborative process between di erent specialities with a variety of tools, it is challenging the integration of the di erent mindsets in dealing with knowledge in order to develop robust ontologies. Therefore, incorporating those tools into one framework to develop ontologies is a promising mechanism to interact directly with specialists through their preferred tools.In this research, we are proposing a document-centric work ow centred around the use of English and standard o ce tooling which should ease the interaction between a domain specialist and an ontologist. There are two popular tools that most biologists tend to use in managing their data; Excel spreadsheet and Word document. Hence, the proposed work which has been done so far is facilitating the use of these two applications. This work ow using Word documents is illustrated in Figure 1. First, the framework is started by the biologists creating an Excel spreadsheet and formatting their sheet as they preferred using all Excel facilities. This spreadsheet is then digested into an ontology by a developer using a programming textual environment of Tawny-OWL [1]. Any modi cations to the spreadsheet is possible as it remains as a part of the ontology's source code. The second framework is started when ontologists generate a literate ontology using Lentic package for documentation3 which can be transformed into Word documents, which biologists can then read and edit using Microsoft Word facilities. The biologists are not required to understand any ontological statements or scripts as the source code is embedded within the text and we have the choice to show or hide it. Also, the ontology developers can incorporate all changes to the text and ontological statements as needed. In this case, an arbitrary and frequently transformation of documents will be performed using Tawny-OWL, as well as 3 http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/lentic/lenticular.html
maintaining the original les as part of the ontology source code. Similar
approaches such as CLCE (Common Logic Controlled English) 4 and Intermediate
representation [
We are now moving toward the testing phase; one aim of this poster is to approach life sciences community to help in appraising our methodology of constructing ontologies. In this early stage of the study, we would like to encourage intrested SWAT4LS' participants (biologists and developers) to test and evaluate our proposed framework. This engagement will be bene cal to improve the interaction activities between di erent specialities' users.