Incorporating presuppositions of competency questions into test-driven development of ontologies

Abstract

Ontology authoring is a complicated and error-prone process since the knowledge being modelled is expressed using logic-based formalisms, in which logical consequences of the knowledge have to be foreseen. Many approaches intended to make this task easier, use competency questions (CQs), being questions expressed in natural language to trace both the correctness and completeness of the ontology at a given time. However, CQs hold so-called presuppositions that have to be satisfied by the ontology to obtain meaningful answers from CQs. Moreover, CQs have to be expressed using a formal language, like ontology query language (SPARQL-OWL), to query the ontology. In this paper, we propose an extension of test-driven ontology development approach by formalization of presupposition satisfaction tests in terms of SPARQL-OWL queries, as well as providing translations of CQs into SPARQL-OWL queries if presupposition tests are passed. We provide a detailed description of the proposed framework and how to incorporate such tests in the workflow of test-driven development of ontologies. It is the first framework available for formalization of SPARQL-OWL queries out of CQs with their presupposition tests.