Test-Driven Development of ontologies (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a test-driven development approach for ontology authoring, providing a systematic testing framework and a Protege plugin to improve validation efficiency and reliability.

Contribution

It presents 36 generic ontology tests, implements them as a Protege plugin, and establishes a TDD methodology for ontology engineering.

Findings

TBox queries are faster than TBox axioms in testing.

Performance advantage increases with larger ontologies.

Provides a foundational TDD process for ontology development.

Abstract

Emerging ontology authoring methods to add knowledge to an ontology focus on ameliorating the validation bottleneck. The verification of the newly added axiom is still one of trying and seeing what the reasoner says, because a systematic testbed for ontology authoring is missing. We sought to address this by introducing the approach of test-driven development for ontology authoring. We specify 36 generic tests, as TBox queries and TBox axioms tested through individuals, and structure their inner workings in an `open box'-way, which cover the OWL 2 DL language features. This is implemented as a Protege plugin so that one can perform a TDD test as a black box test. We evaluated the two test approaches on their performance. The TBox queries were faster, and that effect is more pronounced the larger the ontology is. We provide a general sequence of a TDD process for ontology engineering as a foundation for a TDD methodology.