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Building an error-free and high-quality ontology in OWL (Web Ontology Language)---the latest standard ontology language endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium---is not an easy task for domain experts, who usually have limited knowledge of OWL and logic. One sign of an erroneous ontology is the occurrence of undesired inferences (or entailments), often caused by interactions among (apparently innocuous) axioms within the ontology. This suggests the need for a tool that allows developers to inspect why such an entailment follows from the ontology in order to debug and repair it. This thesis aims to address the above problem by advancing knowledge and techniques in generating explanations for entailments in OWL ontologies. We build on earlier work on identifying minimal subsets of the ontology from which an entailment can be drawn---known technically as justifications. Our main focus is on planning (at a logical level) an explanation that links a justification (premises) to its entailment (conclusion); we also consider how best to express the explanation in English. Among other innovations, we propose a method for assessing the understandability of explanations, so that the easiest can be selected from a set of alternatives. Our findings make a theoretical contribution to Natural Language Generation and Knowledge Representation. They could also play a practical role in improving the explanation facilities in ontology development tools, considering especially the requirements of users who are not expert in OWL.

This research is concerned with an investigation into the reported failures in information systems programmes and of the underlying cause of these failures. The research revealed that end user participation is an important part of the information systems design process for it is rarely the technology that fails but a failure of the information system to meet the expectations of the end user. Research into the literature indicates that a major problem encountered when attempting end user driven participation is that there is a gap in communication between the end users who are experts in the business domain and the developers who are experts in technology. The literature reveals that the challenge of managing this gap in a user driven manner is still the subject of much research. Many attempts to manage the gap that have been reported can be criticised since they are driven by the technical developer and not the end user despite recognising that it is the end user who will be using the information system on a daily basis. The research reported in this thesis provides an account of a unique use of Vickers' notion of Appreciation coupled with the mnemonic PEArL applied in order to first, enable end users to define their information system in a rich and enhanced manner and second, to provide a pathway for end users to 'navigate' the gap (between end users and developers) in a coherent and traceable manner. The developed approach is then applied to a field study in a leading public library in the UK from which lessons are learnt about the approach itself and about end-user driven development of information systems.