OntologyTest: A tool to evaluate ontologies through tests defined by the user

Abstract

The ontology evaluation utilities that are currently available allow the user to check the internal consistency of an ontology, its syntactical correctness and, at most, the fulfillment of some philosophical constraints related to rigidity or identity. However, there is no contribution in the ontology evaluation field that proposes a method to dynamically test ontologies with regard to their functional specification. Thus, no software for this task has been built until now. This paper presents a tool, OntologyTest, designed to overcome this drawback. The tool allows the user to define a set of tests to check the ontology's functional requirements, to execute them, and to inspect the results of the execution. The whole set of tests (or a particular test) can be executed at any time; thus it simplifies the testing of ontology both during its development and during its evolution. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.