Automatically Drafting Ontologies from Competency Questions with FrODO

TL;DR

FrODO is a new tool that automatically drafts domain ontologies from natural language competency questions using frame semantics, aiding engineers in ontology design with effective and qualitative results.

Contribution

Introduces FrODO, a novel method leveraging frame semantics to automatically generate ontologies from competency questions, integrated with FRED.

Findings

FrODO effectively supports ontology design tasks.

Generated ontologies are of high quality.

User study confirms FrODO's usefulness.

Abstract

We present the Frame-based ontology Design Outlet (FrODO), a novel method and tool for drafting ontologies from competency questions automatically. Competency questions are expressed as natural language and are a common solution for representing requirements in a number of agile ontology engineering methodologies, such as the eXtreme Design (XD) or SAMOD. FrODO builds on top of FRED. In fact, it leverages the frame semantics for drawing domain-relevant boundaries around the RDF produced by FRED from a competency question, thus drafting domain ontologies. We carried out a user-based study for assessing FrODO in supporting engineers for ontology design tasks. The study shows that FrODO is effective in this and the resulting ontology drafts are qualitative.