A Controlled Natural Language for the Semantic Web

This article describes how a controlled natural language can be used as an interface language to the Semantic Web. Instead of working with a formal language based on RDF that is difficult to write and understand for non-specialists, a controlled natural language is introduced that allows for describing resources on the Web (via assertional statements) and to construct ontologies (via terminological statements) in a precise way. In addition, a complete rule set written in controlled natural language is presented that allows for efficient reasoning over the assertional and terminological knowledge with the help of a model builder. There is no need to formally encode this knowledge in an RDF-based notation. The same kind of information can be described in a uniform way on the level of the controlled natural language, providing that the users of the controlled natural language are supported by an intelligent writing tool.