Themis: A tool for validating ontologies through requirements

Abstract

The validation of ontologies, whose aim is to check whether an ontology matches the conceptualization it is meant to specify, is a key activity for guaranteeing the quality of ontologies. This work is focused on the validation through requirements, with the aim of assuring, both the domain experts and ontology developers, that the ontologies they are building or using are complete regarding their needs. Inspired by software engineering testing processes, this work proposes a web-based tool called Themis, independent of any ontology development environment, for validating ontologies by means of the application of test expressions which, following lexico-syntactic patterns, represent the desired behaviour that will present an ontology if a requirement is satisfied.