The protégéLOV plugin: Ontology access and reuse for everyone

Abstract

Developing ontologies, by reusing already available and wellknown ontologies, is commonly acknowledge to play a crucial role to facilitate inclusion and expansion of the Web of Data. Some recommendations exist to guide ontologists in ontology engineering, but they do not provide guidelines on how to reuse vocabularies at low fine grained, i.e., reusing specific classes and properties. Moreover, it is still hard to find a tool that provides users with an environment to reuse terms. This paper presents ProtégéLOV, a plugin for the ontology editor Protégé, that combines the access to the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) during ontology modeling. It allows users to search a term in LOV and provides three actions if the term exists: (i) replace the selected term in the current ontology; (ii) add the rdfs:subClassOf or rdfs:subPropertyOf axiom between the selected term and the local term; and (iii) add the owl:equivalentClass or owl:equivalentProperty between the selected term and local term. Results from a preliminary user study indicate that ProtégéLOV does provide an intuitive access and reuse of terms in external vocabularies.