Localising Protégé with Manchester syntax into your language of choice

Some people like a quasi natural language interface in ontology development tools, which is why Manchester Syntax was proposed [1]. A downside is that it locks the ontology developer into English, so that weird chimaeras are generated in the interface if the author prefers another language for the ontology, such as, e.g., the “jirafa come only (oja or ramita)” mentioned in an earlier post and that was deemed unpleasant in an experiment a while ago [2]. Those who prefer the quasi natural language components will have to resort to localising Manchester syntax and the tool’s interface.

This is precisely what two of my former students—Adam Kaliski and Casey O’Donnell—did during their mini-project in the ontology engineering course of 2017. A localisation in Afrikaans, as the case turned out to be. To make this publicly available, Michael Harrison brushed up the code a bit and tested it worked also in the new version of Protégé. It turned out it wasn’t that easy to localise it to another language the way it was done, so one of my PhD students, Toky Raboanary, redesigned the whole thing. This was then tested with Spanish, and found to be working. The remainder of the post describes informally some main aspects of it. If you don’t want to read all that but want to play with it right away: here are the jar files, open source code, and localisation instructions for if you want to create, say, a French or Dutch variant.

Some sensible constraints, some slightly contrived ones (and some bad ones), for the purpose of showing the localisation of the interface for the various keywords. The view in English is included in the screenshot to facilitate comparison.

Some sensible constraints, some slightly contrived ones (and some bad ones), for the purpose of showing the localisation of the interface for the various keywords. The view in English is included in the screenshot to facilitate comparison.

The localisation functions as a plugin for Protégé as a ‘view’ component. It can be selected under “Windows – Views – Class views” and then Beskrywing for the Afrikaans and Descripción for Spanish, and dragged into the desired position; this is likewise for object properties.

Instead of burying the translations in the code, they are specified in a separate XML file, whose content is fetched during the rendering. Adding a new ‘simple’ (more about that later) language merely amounts to adding a new XML file with the translations of the Protégé labels and of the relevant Manchester syntax. Here are the ‘simple’ translations—i.e., where both are fixed strings—for Afrikaans for the relevant tool interface components:

 

Class Description (Label)	Klasbeskrywing (Label in Afrikaans)
Equivalent To	Dieselfde as
SubClass Of	Subklas van
General Class axioms	Algemene Klasaksiomas
SubClass Of (Anonymous Ancestor)	Subklas van (Naamlose Voorvader)
Disjoint With	Disjunkte van
Disjoint Union Of	Disjunkte Unie van

 

The second set of translations is for the Manchester syntax, so as to render that also in the target language. The relevant mappings for Afrikaans class description keywords are listed in the table below, which contain the final choices made by the students who developed the original plugin. For instance, min and max could have been rendered as minimum and maksimum, but the ten minste and by die meeste were deemed more readable despite being multi-word strings. Another interesting bit in the translation is negation, where there has to be a second ‘no’ since Afrikaans has double negation in this construction, so that it renders it as nie <expression> nie. That final rendering is not grammatically perfect, but (hopefully) sufficiently clear:

An attempt at double negation with a fixed string

An attempt at double negation with a fixed string

Manchester OWL Keyword	Afrikaans Manchester OWL Keyword or phrase
some	sommige
only	slegs
min	ten minste
max	by die meeste
exactly	precies
and	en
or	of
not	nie <expression> nie
SubClassOf	SubklasVan
EquivalentTo	DieselfdeAs
DisjointWith	DisjunkteVan

 

The people involved in the translations for the object properties view for Afrikaans are Toky, my colleague Tommie Meyer (also at UCT), and myself; snyding for ‘intersection’ sounds somewhat odd to me, but the real tough one to translate was ‘SuperProperty’. Of the four options that were considered—SuperEienskap, SuperVerwantskap, SuperRelasie, and SuperVerband— SuperVerwantskap was chosen with Tommie having had the final vote, which is also a semantic translation, not a literal translation.

Screenshot of the object properties description, with comparison to the English

The Spanish version also has multi-word strings, but at least does not do double negation. On the other hand, it has accents. To generate the Spanish version, myself, my collaborator Pablo Fillottrani from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina, and Toky had a go at it in translating the terms. This was then implemented with the XML file. In case you do not want to dig into the XML file and not install the plugin either, but have a quick look at the translations, they are as follows for the class description view:

 

Class Description Label	Descripción (in Spanish)
Equivalent To	Equivalente a
SubClass Of	Subclase de
General Class axioms	Axiomas generales de clase
SubClass Of (Anonymous Ancestor)	Subclase de (Ancestro Anónimo)
Disjoint With	Disjunto con
Disjoint Union Of	Unión Disjunta de
Instances	Instancias

 

Manchester OWL Keyword	Spanish Manchester OWL Keyword
some	al menos uno
only	sólo
min	al mínimo
max	al máximo
and	y
or	o
not	no
exactly	exactamente
SubClassOf	SubclaseDe
EquivalentTo	EquivalenteA
DisjointWith	DisjuntoCon

And here’s a rendering of a real ontology, for geo linked data in Spanish, rather than African wildlife yet again:

screenshot of the plugin behaviour with someone else’s ontology in Spanish

One final comment remains, which has to do with the ‘simple’ mentioned above. The approach of localisation presented here works only with fixed strings, i.e., the strings do not have to change depending on the context where it is uses. It won’t work with, say, isiZulu—a highly agglutinating and inflectional language—because isiZulu doesn’t have fixed strings for the Manchester syntax keywords nor for some other labels. For instance, ‘at least one’ has seven variants for nouns in the singular, depending on the noun class of the noun of the OWL class it quantifies over; e.g., elilodwa for ‘at least one’ apple, and esisodwa for ‘at least one’ twig. Also, the conjugation of the verb for the object property depends on the noun class of the noun of the OWL class, but in this case for the one that plays the subject; e.g., it’s “eats” in English for both humans and elephants eating, say, fruit, so one string for the name of the object property, but that’s udla and idla, respectively, in isiZulu. This requires annotations of the classes with ontolex-lemon or a similar approach and a set of rules (which we have, btw) to determine what to do in which case, which requires on-the-fly modifications to Manchester syntax keywords and elements’ names or labels. And then there’s still phonological conditioning to account for. It surely can be done, but it is not as doable as with the ‘simple’ languages that have at least a disjunctive orthography and much less genders or noun classes for the nouns.

In closing, while there’s indeed more to translate in the Protégé interface in order to fully localise it, hopefully this already helps as-is either for reading at least a whole axiom in one’s language or as stepping stone to extend it further for the other terms in the Manchester syntax and the interface. Feel free to extend our open source code.

 

References

[1] Matthew Horridge, Nicholas Drummond, John Goodwin, Alan Rector, Robert Stevens and Hai Wang (2006). The Manchester OWL syntax. OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED’06), Athens, Georgia, USA, 10-11 Nov 2016, CEUR-WS vol 216.

[2] Keet, C.M. The use of foundational ontologies in ontology development: an empirical assessment. 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’11), G. Antoniou et al (Eds.), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 29 May-2 June, 2011. Springer LNCS 6643, 321-335.

[3] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Toward a knowledge-to-text controlled natural language of isiZulu. Language Resources and Evaluation, 2017, 51:131-157. accepted version

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DL notation plugin for Protégé 5.x

Once upon a time… the Protégé ontology development environment used Description Logic (DL) symbols and all was well—for some users at least. Then Manchester Syntax came along as the new kid on the block, using hearsay and opinion and some other authors’ preferences for an alternative rendering to the DL notation [1]. Subsequently, everyone who used Protégé was forced to deal with those new and untested keywords in the interface, like ‘some’ and ‘only’ and such, rather than the DL symbols. That had another unfortunate side-effect, being that it hampers internationalisation, for it jumbles up things rather awkwardly when your ontology vocabulary is not in English, like, say, “jirafa come only (oja or ramita)”. Even in the same English-as-first-language country, it turned out that under a controlled set-up, the DL axiom rendering in Protégé fared well in a fairly large sized experiment when compared to the Protégé interface with the sort of Manchester syntax with GUI [2], and also the OWL 2 RL rules rendering appear more positive in another (smaller) experiment [3]. Various HCI factors remain to be examined in more detail, though.

In the meantime, we didn’t fully reinstate the DL notation in Protégé in the way it was in Protégé v3.x from some 15 years ago, but with our new plugin, it will at least render the class expression in DL notation in the tool. This has the benefits that

1. the modeller will receive immediate feedback during the authoring stage regarding a notation that may be more familiar to at least a knowledge engineer or expert modeller;
2. it offers a natural language-independent rendering of the axioms with respect to the constructors, so that people may develop their ontology in their own language if they wish to do so, without being hampered by continuous code switching or the need for localisation; and
3. it also may ease the transition from theory (logics) to implementation for ontology engineering novices.

Whether it needs to be integrated further among more components of the tabs and views in Protégé or other ODEs, is also a question for HCI experts to answer. The code for the DL plugin is open source, so you could extend it if you wish to do so.

The plugin itself is a jar file that can simply be dragged into the plugin folder of a Protégé installation (5.x); see the github repo for details. To illustrate it briefly, after dragging the jar file into the plugin folder, open Protégé, and add it as a view:

Then when you add some new axioms or load an ontology, select a class, and it will render all the axioms in DL notation, as shown in the following two screenshots form different ontologies:

For the sake of illustration, here’s the giraffe that eats only leaves or twigs, in the Spanish version of the African Wildlife Ontology:

The first version of the tool was developed by Michael Harrison and Larry Liu as part of their mini-project for the ontology engineering course in 2017, and it was brushed up for presentation beyond that just now by Michael Harrison (meanwhile an MSc student a CS@UCT), which was supported by a DOT4D grant to improve my textbook on ontology engineering and accompanying educational resources. We haven’t examined all possible ‘shapes’ that a class expression can take, but it definitely processes the commonly used features well. At the time of writing, we haven’t detected any errors.

p.s.: if you want your whole ontology exported at once in DL notation and to latex, for purposes of documentation generation, that is a different usage scenario and is already possible [4].

p.p.s.: if you want more DL notation, please let me know, and I’ll try to find more resources to make a v2 with more features.

References

[1] Matthew Horridge, Nicholas Drummond, John Goodwin, Alan Rector, Robert Stevens and Hai Wang (2006). The Manchester OWL syntax. OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED’06), Athens, Georgia, USA, 10-11 Nov 2016, CEUR-WS vol 216.

[2] E. Alharbi, J. Howse, G. Stapleton, A. Hamie and A. Touloumis. The efficacy of OWL and DL on user understanding of axioms and their entailments. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2017, C. d’Amato, M. Fernandez, V. Tamma, F. Lecue, P. Cudre-Mauroux, J. Sequeda, C. Lange and J. He (eds.). Springer 2017, pp20-36.

[3] M. K. Sarker, A. Krisnadhi, D. Carral and P. Hitzler, Rule-based OWL modeling with ROWLtab Protégé plugin. Proceedings of ESWC’17, E. Blomqvist, D. Maynard, A. Gangemi, R. Hoekstra, P. Hitzler and O. Hartig (eds.). Springer. 2017, pp 419-433.

[4] Cogan Shimizu, Pascal Hitzler, Matthew Horridge: Rendering OWL in Description Logic Syntax. ESWC (Satellite Events) 2017. Springer LNCS. pp109-113