Designing User interfaces to Minimise Common Errors in Ontology Development: The CO-ODE and HyOntUse Projects

Understanding and using OWL can be difficult. Until recently, the difficulty was made, if anything, greater by user interfaces which were designed more to demonstrate OWL than to fit users requirements. The new interfaces being developed in the Protégé-OWL/CO-ODE/HyOntUse projects are based, to a large extent, on experience in tutorials, workshops, and practical development with users. They are designed to avoid the most common errors and pitfalls and make debugging easier and quicker. At the same time, they have proved to streamline many operations so as to make development much faster and easier for experienced ontology engineers.