WhatIf: Answering "What if..." questions for Ontology Authoring

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We have a richness of data about numerous aspects of our activities, yet these data are only any use when we know what they are, agree upon what they are and how they relate to each other. Semantic descriptions of data, the means by which we can achieve these aims, are widely used to help exploit data in industry, academia and at home. One way of providing such meaning or semantics for data is through "ontologies", yet these ontologies can be hard to build, especially for the very people that are expert in the fields whose knowledgeis being captured but who are not experienced in the specialised "modelling" field. In the "what if...?" project we look atthe problems of creating ontologies using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). With OWL logical forms, computers can deduce knowledge that is only implied within the statements made by the modeller. So any statement made by a modeller can have a dramatic effect on what is implied. These implications can be both "good" and "bad" in terms of the aims of themodeller. Consequently, a modeller is always asking themself "what if...?" questions as they model a field of interest. Such a question might be "what happens if I say that a planetmust be orbiting a star?" or "what happens if I add in this date/time ontology?". The aim of the "what if...?" project is tobuild a dialogue system allowing a person building an ontologyto ask such questions and getmeaningful answers. This requires getting the computer to determine whatthe consequences of a change in the ontology would be and getting it topresent these consequences in a meaningful way. To do a good job,the system will have to understand something about what the person is tryingto do and what sorts of results will be most interesting to them. For this,we need to understand more about how ontologists model a domain and interact with tools; be able to model the dialogues between a human and the authoring system; achieve responsive auttomated reasoning that can provide the dialogue system with the information it nees to create that dialogue.