Test-driven development (TDD) for ontology authoring [1] has received attention previously, including its accompanying tool TDDOnto [2] that was subsequently improved upon into the (also open source) TDDonto2 tool [3]. The TDDonto2 demo paper [3] did not contain the technical details about the new-and-improved algorithms and specification for TDD testing that we claimed it had. They are published just now in the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, as the article entitled More Effective Ontology Authoring with Test-Driven Development and the TDDonto2 tool [4]. The better algorithms cover more OWL language features than the original v1 of the theory and tool and it includes a specification for TDD testing such that there is not just pass/fail/absent as test result, but specific outcomes of the TDD test that are more informative, like that the ontology will become incoherent if that axiom were to be added. Given that model, the general flow for a simple standard case of a single TDD test (though more axioms can be tested at once) is as follows:
simplified view of the extended TDD process (source: adapted from [4])
The paper’s title clearly also hints to another contribution: using TDDonto2 for ontology authoring is significantly more effective. It was compared against the commonly used (and test-last) Protégé interface, which showed that the participants completed a larger part of the task in less time and with fewer mistakes. It also requires fewer interactions (clicking and typing) in the interface, which we reported on in an earlier (longer) tech report [5].
screenshot of the outcome of running the four tests on the sample ontology, in TDDonto2
As usual with research, more can be done. This is especially with respect to the white boxes in the figure above, i.e., the other aspects that would contribute toward a complete TDD methodology for ontology development. One step that we have been working on, is the idea of turning competency questions into axioms for TDD, which now is doable from CQ to SPARQL-OWL query [6] (more about that later), a CNL that may contribute to the authoring [7], and trying to figure out the modelling styles more precisely [8], since they hamper automation of these first steps in the process to get those axioms into the TDD plugin in a user-friendly way.
References
[1] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies. 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16). Springer LNCS vol. 9678, 642-657. 29 May – 2 June, 2016, Crete, Greece.
[2] Lawrynowicz, A., Keet, C.M. The TDDonto Tool for Test-Driven Development of DL Knowledge bases. 29th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL’16). April 22-25, Cape Town, South Africa. CEUR WS vol. 1577.
[3] Davies, K. Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. TDDonto2: A Test-Driven Development Plugin for arbitrary TBox and ABox axioms. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2017 Satellite Events, Blomqvist, E et al. (eds.). Springer LNCS vol 10577, 120-125. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017.
[4] Davies, K., Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. More Effective Ontology Authoring with Test-Driven Development and the TDDonto2 tool. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, 2019, 28(7): 1950023.
[5] Keet, C.M., Davies, K., Lawrynowicz, A. More Effective Ontology Authoring with Test-Driven Development. Technical Report 1812.06015. December 2018
[6] Wisniewski, D., Potoniec, J., Lawrynowicz, A., Keet, C.M. Analysis of Ontology Competency Questions and their Formalisations in SPARQL-OWL. Journal of Web Semantics. (in print)
[7] Keet, C.M., Mahlaza, Z., Antia, M.-J. CLaRO: a Controlled Language for Authoring Competency Questions. 13th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR’19). 28-31 Oct 2019, Rome, Italy. Springer CCIS. (in print)
[8] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M.. Dimensions Affecting Representation Styles in Ontologies. 1st Iberoamerican conference on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web (KGSWC’19). Springer CCIS vol. 1029, 186-200. 23-30 June 2019, Villa Clara, Cuba.
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