MoKi: a Wiki-Based Conceptual Modeling Tool∗ Chiara Ghidini Marco Rospocher Luciano Serafini FBK–irst FBK–irst FBK–irst Via Sommarive 18 Povo Via Sommarive 18 Povo Via Sommarive 18 Povo I-38123, Trento, Italy I-38123, Trento, Italy I-38123, Trento, Italy ghidini@fbk.eu rospocher@fbk.eu serafini@fbk.eu ABSTRACT The success of wikis for collaborative knowledge construction is triggering the development of a number of tools for collaborative conceptual modeling based on them. In this paper we present a completely revised version of MoKi, a tool for modelling ontolo- gies and business process models in an integrated way. 1. CONCEPTUAL MODELING WITH MoKi MoKi 1 is a collaborative MediaWiki-based2 tool for modeling Figure 1: Unstructured access mode ontological and procedural knowledge in an integrated manner. The main idea behind MoKi is to associate a wiki page, containing both unstructured and structured information, to each entity of the on- to other MoKi pages or to external resources, uploaded images, and tology and process model. so on. The format of this part of the page is the same for all the In this section we present a completely revised version of MoKi, different elements of the models. which extends the first release of the tool (see [2]). The main The structured part This part, which is delimited by specific tags changes w.r.t. [2] are (i) the redesign of the content organisation to separate it from the unstructured text, contains knowledge stored of the MoKi page, which now comprises an unstructured part and according to the modelling language adopted. In the current im- a structured part (this extends and replaces the simple representa- plementation, the structured part of a page describing an ontology tional languages used in [2]); and (ii) the multi-mode access to the element contains a RDF/XML serialisation of a set of OWL state- page content, to support easy usage both by domain experts and ments formalising the element, while, similarly, the structured part knowledge engineers, thus facilitating them to play an equally cen- of a page describing a BPMN process contains an XML serialisa- tral role in the modelling activities (this extends and replaces the tion of the process diagram. single template-based access mode provided in [2]). 1.2 Supporting multi-mode access in MoKi 1.1 The MoKi page Users can access the ontological and procedural knowledge con- Being a tool supporting the description of ontological and proce- tained in MoKi using three different access modes: one mode, the dural knowledge according to OWL and BPMN, the basic element unstructured access mode, to access the unstructured part of a MoKi for MoKi are concepts, properties, and individuals in the ontol- page, and two different modes, the fully-structured access mode ogy, and processes in the process model. Each instance of these and the lightly-structured access mode, to access the structured elements is therefore associated to a MoKi page, composed of an part. unstructured part and a structured part. The unstructured access mode This access mode allows the user The unstructured part This part contains text written following to edit/view the content of the unstructured part of the MoKi page the standard MediaWiki markup format: in particular, it can con- of a model element. The editing/viewing of this part occurs in the tain plain text, possibly enriched by formatting information, links standard MediaWiki way (e.g. see Figure 13 ). ∗The work described in this paper has been partially funded by the The fully-structured access mode This access mode allows the European Commission under the contract number FP7-248594 user to edit/view the content of the structured part of a MoKi page 1 See http://moki.fbk.eu. using the full expressivity of the modelling language adopted. For 2 See http://www.mediawiki.org. ontological knowledge the fully-structured access mode allows the user to view/edit formal statements (axioms) describing the element associated to the page. Axioms are written according to the la- tex2owl syntax4 , an intuitive latex-style format for writing ontolo- gies using a text-editor, format which can be automatically trans- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for lated into (an RDF/XML serialisation of) OWL. The user can easily personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are edit the list of axioms in a form based interface, as the one shown not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to 3 republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific The content of the page in Figure 1 is an excerpt taken from permission and/or a fee. Wikipedia. 4 Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$10.00. see dkm.fbk.eu/index.php/Latex2owl allow to explore the generalisation and part/subparts decomposi- tion hierarchies of ontology concepts, as well as the classification of the ontology individuals. In particular, MoKi provides two kinds of model overview pages. In the tabular-based one, the user can access a table listing every concept (resp. individual) of the ontol- ogy together with the concepts of which it is a specialisation and the concepts in which it decomposes according to the part of re- lation (resp. the concepts to which the individual belongs to). In the graphical-based one, a tree-like view shows the hierarchy of Figure 2: Fully-structured access mode concepts according to either the subclass or the part-of relation, or the membership of individuals to concepts. Drag and drop editing facilities are also provided to rearrange the tree. For procedural in Figure 2. knowledge, the model overview page provides an overview of the For procedural knowledge we have implemented an access mode process/sub-process decomposition mechanism by means of a table that, by tightly integrating in MoKi the Oryx editor5 , a full-fledged listing every process defined in MoKi together with the processes business process editor, allows the user to edit the BPMN process in which it decomposes. diagram described in the page. The lightly-structured access mode The purpose of this access 1.4 Usages of MoKi mode is to allow users with limited knowledge engineering skills, The different versions of MoKi have been applied in several sce- to edit/view the content of the structured part of the MoKi page in narios. Focusing on the usages with real domain experts, MoKi has a simplified and less formal way. For ontological knowledge the been successfully applied by four application partners within the lightly-structured access mode is provided through a form made FP6 EU-project APOSDLE7 to develop enterprise models (com- of two components, as depicted in Figure 3. In the top half part posed of a domain ontology and a process model) in six different domains, and it is currently used by a team of knowledge engi- neers and domain experts to collaboratively build an Organic Agri- culture and Agroecology Ontology within the FP7 EU-project Or- ganic.Edunet8 . Although the version of the tool here presented is tailored to the development of ontologies and business processes, the tool can be customized to support modelling other kinds of knowledge. For example, a preliminary version of the tool which support modelling of clinical protocols according the ASBRU language is described in [1]. 2. CONCLUSIONS In this paper we have presented a completely revised version of MoKi, a tool for modelling ontologies and business process mod- els in an integrated way. The main novelties of the tool w.r.t. the Figure 3: Lightly-structured access mode previous version presented ([2]), are (i) a different content organi- sation of the page, which now comprises an unstructured part and a the user can view and edit simple statements which can be easily structured part, and (ii) the implementation of a multi-mode access converted to/from OWL statements. If the OWL version of any to the page content, to support easy usage both by domain experts of these statements is already contained in the structured part of and knowledge engineers, thus facilitating them to play an equally the page, then the corresponding fields are pre-filled with the ap- central role in the modelling activities. propriate content. Similarly, when any of these simple statements In our future work, we aim at improving the support for process is modified in the lightly-structured access mode, the changes are modeling, in particular in providing an extensive automatic support propagated to the content of the structural part of the page. The for aligning the fully-structured access mode and lightly-structured bottom half of the form provides a description of those OWL state- access mode in case of procedural knowledge. We also aim at eval- ments which cannot be intuitively translated/edited as simple state- uating our tool further, on larger case studies. ments as the ones in the top half of the page. In the current imple- mentation, this part contains the translation of those statements in 3. REFERENCES Attempto Controlled English, provided by the OWL 2 Verbalizer6 . [1] C. Eccher, A. Ferro, A. Seyfang, M. Rospocher, and For procedural knowledge we have implemented an access mode S. Miksch. Modeling clinical protocols using semantic based on a light-weight graphical process editor which uses a re- MediaWiki: the case of the Oncocure project. In ECAI stricted subset of process building blocks. workshop on Knowledge Management for Healthcare Processes (K4HelP), 2008. 1.3 Model Overview pages in MoKi [2] C. Ghidini, B. Kump, S. Lindstaedt, N. Mahbub, V. Pammer, Model Overview pages are MoKi special pages dynamically cre- M. Rospocher, and L. Serafini. MoKi: The Enterprise ated from the (structured) content of the pages describing model Modelling Wiki. In Proceedings of ESWC 2009, volume 5554 elements. For ontological knowledge, the model overview pages of LNCS, pages 831–835. Springer, 2009. Demo Session. 5 7 See http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx/ See http://www.aposdle.org/ 6 8 See http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch. See http://www.organic-edunet.eu/