Attempto Tools and Resources

ACE (Attempto Controlled English)

• ACE in a Nutshell is a short overview of the ACE language
• ACE Construction Rules lists the rules that determine which sentences belong to ACE
• ACE Interpretation Rules lists the rules that remove the ambiguity from ACE sentences
• ACE Troubleshooting Guide describes how to express certain constructs in ACE and how to avoid pitfalls

APE (ACE parser)

The source code of the Attempto Parsing Engine (APE) in available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Recent versions of APE are found on GitHub:

• project page
• downloads

Furthermore, there is a content word lexicon Clex with ~100,000 entries to be used with APE. Clex is covered by the GNU General Public License.

Recent versions of Clex are found on GitHub:

• project page

Older versions of APE and Clex can be downloaded from here.

In order to use APE, you must first install SWI-Prolog and its packages (minimally: clib, sgml and http).

The ACE parser APE can be used through a APE Webclient, or directly via a APE Webservice. There is also a simple command-line tool ape.exe that provides an interface to APE and its tools. For example, executing:

./ape.exe -text "Every man is a human." -solo drsxml

will output the DRS of the ACE sentence "Every man is a human." in XML. To compile this command-line tool, just execute make_exe.sh (or make_exe.bat, if you are using Windows).

APE also comes with a Java interface.

Related documentation:

• DRS Report (PDF) specifies the target language DRS of APE
• ACE Syntax Report specifies the syntax (i.e. the grammar) of ACE that APE implements
• APE Webservice Specification describes a REST-webservice through which APE can be used
• ACE Lexicon Specification describes the format of lexicons used by APE
• APE Webclient Help describes APE's Ajax-based webclient
• Javadoc documentation describes the Java Interface for APE

RACE (ACE reasoner)

The ACE reasoner RACE allows users to do deduction on ACE texts, for example consistency checks and query answering.

• RACE Webclient
• RACE Webclient Help explains the RACE webclient
• RACE Web Service describes the SOAP-webservice for RACE

AceRules

AceRules is a forward-chaining rule system where the rules and the answer sets are written in ACE. AceRules supports multiple semantics: courteous logic programs, stable models, and stable models with strong negation.

There is a public webservice for AceRules with two interfaces: the AceRules interface serves as a demonstration, while the AceRules technical interface supports developers.

• AceRules Webservice describes the SOAP-webservice for AceRules
• Source code
• Screencast: AceRules demonstrates the webclient of the AceRules system

AceWiki

AceWiki is a semantic wiki using ACE. Unlike most other semantic wikis, the semantics is contained directly in the article texts and not in some form of annotations.

• Project page
• Screencast: AceWiki
• AceWiki Grammar describes the subset of ACE used within AceWiki
• Javadoc documentation of AceWiki and the ACE Editor

AceWiki-GF

AceWiki-GF combines AceWiki with the Grammatical Framework (GF) in order to make CNL-based semantic wikis multilingual. The AceWiki-GF source code is part of the AceWiki source code.

• Project page
• Screencast: AceWiki-GF

ACE View

ACE View is an ontology and rule editor that uses ACE to create, view and edit OWL 2 ontologies and SWRL rulesets. ACE View is implemented as a plugin for the Protégé ontology editor.

• Project page
• Source code and downloads
• Screencast: ACE View

OWL Verbalizer

OWL verbalizer converts OWL ontologies (expressed in XML serialization) into ACE.

• Project page
• Demo and documentation

ACE Editor

The ACE Editor demonstrates how editing of ACE texts can be done in a convenient way employing a predictive editor that helps users to construct syntactically correct sentences. The ACE Editor is not a finished tool but rather a general basis to create domain-specific tools on top of it. The ACE Editor source code is part of the AceWiki source code.

• Demo
• The ACE Editor Grammar describes the subset of ACE used within the ACE Editor
• Javadoc documentation of AceWiki and the ACE Editor

ACE-in-GF

ACE-in-GF implements the syntax of a large subset of ACE in the Grammatical Framework and ports it to 20+ other natural languages.

• Project page

Other

• The ontograph framework is an experiment framework to test controlled natural languages.
• Authoring Tools for ACE discusses the use of predictive authoring tools for ACE.
• Writing OWL ontologies in ACE describes how to use ACE to create OWL ontologies
• OWL ACE Construction Rules lists (both informally and formally) the rules that determine which sentences belong to the subset of ACE that is used when verbalizing OWL

Externally developed tools

Using the Grammatical Framework Krasimir Angelov and Aarne Ranta (both at University of Gothenburg) implemented a grammar for ACE and ported it to five other European languages.

Juri Luca De Coi (University of Hannover and University of Bologna) translates policy rules expressed in ACE into the Protune policy language and has been developing several tools for this purpose.

Nelson C. Dellis (University of Miami) developed the world knowledge reasoning system CNL-WKR that uses ACE as input language.

Normunds Grūzītis (University of Latvia) combined the ACE parser, the OWL verbalizer and the Grammatical Framework in ACE compliant controlled Latvian for ontology authoring and verbalization.

David Hirtle (University of Waterloo) developed TRANSLATOR that converts an ACE text into RuleML.

Geoff Sutcliffe (University of Miami) added ACE input to his TPTP tools.

Geoff Sutcliffe (University of Miami) and his collaborators have used ACE in their project SporcleAI that combines a quiz game with artificial reasoning.

Joshua A. Taylor (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is developing CL-ACE, a set of Lisp bindings for some of the Attempto Tools.

Pierre-Alexandre Voye (University of Nantes) wrote the Analysis Tool (DAT) that parses and analyses the DRS output of the Attempto Parsing Engine APE.