NaturalOWL: Generating Texts from OWL Ontologies in Prot´ eg´ e and in Second Life

NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language genera- tion engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The on- tologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Prot´ ege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual mu- seums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the on- tologies directly.