Use of Competency Questions in Ontology Engineering: A Survey

Abstract

The interest in the ontology subject has grown in recent decades. Ontologies can be used to assign semantics to information items and solve interoperability and knowledge-related problems. Many methods have been proposed to improve the ontology engineering process. The use of competence questions (CQs) is suggested by several of them as a means to define the ontology requirements and help identify the necessary concepts, properties, and relations. CQs are questions that the ontology should be able to answer. Thus, they provide a mechanism to verify if the ontology is in accordance with the established requirements and properly represents the desired knowledge. Despite the important role of CQs, there is a lack of deeper investigation to provide evidence about their use. Therefore, aiming to investigate how CQs have been used in ontology engineering practice, we performed a survey with 63 ontology engineers. The results indicate that CQs have helped mainly to define the ontology scope and evaluate the ontology conceptualization. However, ontology engineers still face difficulties when writing, using, and managing CQs. Although there is a range of methods and tools that support ontology development, guidance regarding CQs is still limited. This paper presents our study and discusses its main findings.