OntoSketch: Towards Digital Sketching as a Tool for Creating and Extending Ontologies for Non-Experts

This paper introduces a sketch-based interaction concept called OntoSketch, enabling non-experts to create and extend formally represented knowledge. Contrary to current editors, OntoSketch is based on lightweight pen and paper-like interactions, including a visual vocabulary that supports non-experts in modeling knowledge about specific domain information. The visualization concept is based on previous work as well as insights from a user study with 20 participants. OntoSketch enables the user to work in three views with his data: created domain examples, related or emerging abstract concepts and a combination of both. This allows for reflection while creating formalized knowledge. An export function allows a non-expert to generate an ontology out of his sketch-based work, without the necessity to understand the concept of ontologies in detail. Our approach is demonstrated via a prototypical tablet-PC application.