Our ESWC17 demos: TDDonto2 and an OWL verbaliser for isiZulu

Besides the full paper on heterogeneous alignments for 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17) that will take place next week in Portoroz, Slovenia, we also managed to squeeze out two demo papers. You may already know of TDDonto2 with Kieren Davies and Agnieszka Lawrynowicz, which was discussed in an earlier post that has been updated with a tutorial video. It now has a demo paper as well [1], which describes the rationale and a few scenarios. The other demo, with Musa Xakaza and Langa Khumalo, is new-new, but the regular reader might have seen it coming: we finally managed to link the verbalisation patterns for certain Description Logic axiom types [2,3] to those in OWL ontologies. The tool takes as input an ontology in isiZulu and the verbalisation algorithms, and out come the isiZulu sentences, be this in plain text for further processing or in a GUI for inspection by a domain expert [4]. There is a basic demo-screencast to show it’s all working.

The overall architecture may be of interest, for it deviates from most OWL verbalisers. It is shown in the following figure:

For instance, we use the Python-based OWL API Owlready, rather than a Java-based app, for Python is rather popular in NLP and the verbalisation algorithms may be used elsewhere as well. We made more such decisions with the aim to make whatever we did as multi-purpose usable as possible, like the list of nouns with noun classes (surprisingly, and annoyingly, there is no such readily available list yet, though isizulu.net probably will have it somewhere but inaccessible), verb roots, and exceptions in pluralisation. (Problems for integrating the verbaliser with, say, Protégé will be interesting to discuss during the demo session!)

The text-based output doesn’t look as nice as the GUI interface, so I will show here only the GUI interface, which is adorned with some annotations to illustrate that those verbalisation algorithms in the background are far from trivial templates:

For instance, while in English the universal quantification is always ‘Each’ or ‘All’ regardless the named class quantified over, in isiZulu it depends on the noun class of the noun that is the name of the OWL class. For instance, in the figure above, izingwe ‘leopards’ is in noun class 10, so the ‘Each/All’ is Zonke, amavazi ‘vases’ is in noun class 6, so ‘Each/All’ then becomes Onke, and abantu ‘people’/’humans’ is in noun class 2, making Bonke. There are 17 noun classes. They also determine the subject concords (SC, alike conjugation) for the verbs, with zi- for noun class 10, ­a- for noun class 6, and ba- for noun class 2, to name a few. How this all works is described in [2,3]. We’ve implemented all those algorithms and integrated the pluraliser [5] in it to make it work. The source files are available to check and play with already, you can do so and ask us during the ESWC17 demo session, and/or also have a look at the related outputs of the NRF-funded project Grammar Engine for Nguni natural language interfaces (GeNi).

 

References

[1] Davies, K. Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. TDDonto2: A Test-Driven Development Plugin for arbitrary TBox and ABox axioms. Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17), Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (demo paper)

[2] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Toward a knowledge-to-text controlled natural language of isiZulu. Language Resources and Evaluation, 2017, 51:131-157.

[3] Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. On the verbalization patterns of part-whole relations in isiZulu. 9th International Natural Language Generation conference (INLG’16), 5-8 September, 2016, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics, 174-183.

[4] Keet, C.M. Xakaza, M., Khumalo, L. Verbalising OWL ontologies in isiZulu with Python. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (demo paper)

[5] Byamugisha, J., Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. Pluralising Nouns in isiZulu and Related Languages. 17th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing’16), Springer LNCS. April 3-9, 2016, Konya, Turkey.

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The TDDonto tool to try out TDD for ontology authoring

Last month I wrote about Test-Driven Development for ontologies, which is described in more detail in the ESWC’16 paper I co-authored with Agnieszka Lawrynowicz [1]. That paper does not describe much about the actual tool implementing the tests, TDDonto, although we have it and used it for the performance evaluation. Some more detail on its design and more experimental results are described in the paper “The TDDonto Tool for Test-Driven Development of DL Knowledge Bases” [2] that has just been published in the proceedings of the 29th International Workshop on Description Logics, which will take place next weekend in Cape Town (22-25 April 2016).

What we couldn’t include there in [2] is multiple screenshots to show how it works, but a blog is a fine medium for that, so I’ll illustrate the tool with some examples in the remainder of the post. It’s an alpha version that works. No usability and HCI evaluations have been done, but at least it’s a Protégé plugin rather than command line :).

First, you need to download the plugin from Agnieszka’s ARISTOTELES project page and place the jar file in the plugins folder of Protégé 5.0. You can then go to the Protégé menu bar, select Windows – Views – Evaluation views – TDDOnto, and place it somewhere on the screen and start using it. For the examples here, I used the African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontology (AWO v1) from my ontology engineering course.

Make sure to have selected an automated reasoner, and classify your ontology. Now, type a new test in the “New test” field at the top, e.g. carnivore DisjointWith: herbivore, click “Add test”, select the checkbox of the test to execute, and click the “Execute test”: the status will be returned, as shown in the screenshot below. In this case, the “OK” says that the disjointness is already asserted or entailed in the ontology.

Now let’s do a TDD test that is going to fail (you won’t know upfront, of course); e.g., testing whether impalas are herbivores:

The TDD test failed because the subsumption is neither asserted nor entailed in the ontology. One can then click “add to ontology”, which updates the ontology:

Note that the reasoner has to be run again after a change in the ontology.

Lets do two more: testing whether lion is a carnivore and that flower is a plan part. The output of the tests is as follows:

It returns “OK” for the lion, because it is entailed in the ontology: a carnivore is an entity that eats only animals or parts thereof, and lions eat only herbivore and eats some impala (which are animals). The other one, Flower SubClassOf: PlantParts fails as “undefined”, because Flower is not in the ontology.

Ontologies do not have only subsumption and disjointness axioms, so let’s assume that impalas eat leaves and we want check whether that is in the ontology, as well as whether lions eat animals:

The former failed because there are no properties for the impala in the AWO v1, the latter passed, because a lion eats impala, and impala is an animal. Or: the TDDOnto tool indeed behaves as expected.

Currently, only a subset of all the specified tests have been implemented, due to some limitations of existing tools, but we’re working on implementing those as well.

If you have any feedback on TDDOnto, please don’t hesitate to tell us. I hope to be seeing you later in the week at DL’16, where I’ll be presenting the paper on Sunday afternoon (24th) and I also can give a live demo any time during the workshop (or afterwards, if you stay for KR’16).

 

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies. 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16). Springer LNCS. 29 May – 2 June, 2016, Crete, Greece. (in print)

[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.

Ontology authoring with a Test-Driven Development approach

Ontology development has its processes and procedures—conducting a domain analysis, the implementation, maintenance, and so on—which have been developed since the mid 1990s. These high-level information systems-like methodologies don’t tell you what and how to add the knowledge to the ontology, however, i.e., the ontology authoring stage is a ‘just do it’, but not how. There are, perhaps surprisingly, few methods for how to do that; notably, FORZA uses domain and range constraints and the reasoner to propose a suitable part-whole relation [1] and advocatus diaboli zooms in on disjointness constraints among classes [2]. In a way, they all use what can be considered as tests on the ontology before adding an axiom. This smells of notions that are well-known in software engineering: unit tests, test-driven development (TDD), and Agile, with the latter two relying on different methodologies cf. the earlier ones (waterfall, iterative, and similar).

Some of those software engineering approaches have been adjusted and adopted for ontology engineering; e.g., the Agile-inspired OntoMaven that uses the standard reasoning services as tests [3], eXtreme Design with ODPs [4] that have been prepared previously, and Vrandecic and Gangemi’s early exploration of possibilities for unit tests [5]. Except for Warrender & Lord’s TDD tests for subsumption [6], they are all test-last approaches (design, author, test), rather than a test-first approach (test, author, test). The test-first approach is called test-driven development in software engineering [7], which has been ported to conceptual modelling recently as well [8]. TDD is a step up from a “add something and lets see what the reasoner says” stance, because one has to think and check upfront first before doing. (Competency questions can help with that, but they don’t say how to add the knowledge.) The question that arises, then, is how such a TDD approach would look like for ontology development. Some of the more detailed questions to be answered are (from [9]):

• Given the TDD procedure for programming in software engineering, then what does that mean for ontologies during ontology authoring?
• TDD uses mock objects for incomplete parts of the code, and mainly for methods; is there a parallel to it in ontology development, or can that aspect of TDD be ignored?
• In what way, and where, (if at all) can this be integrated as a methodological step in existing ontology engineering methodologies?

We—Agnieszka Lawrynowicz from Poznan University of Technology in Poland and I—answer these questions in our paper that was recently accepted at the 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16), to be held in May 2016 in Crete, Greece: Test-Driven Development of Ontologies [9]. In short: we specified tests for the OWL 2 DL language features and basic types of axioms one can add, implemented it as a Protégé plug-in, and tested it on performance with 67 ontologies (result: great). The tool and test data can be downloaded from Agnieszka’s ARISTOTELES project page.

Now slightly less brief than that one-liner. The tests—like for class subsumption, domain and range, a property chain—can be specified in two principal ways, called TBox tests and ABox tests. The TBox tests rely solely on knowledge represented in the TBox, whereas for the ABox tests, mock individuals are explicitly added for a particular TBox axiom. For instance, the simple existential quantification, as shown below, where the TBox query is denoted in SPARQL-OWL notation.

 

 

 

 

 

For the implementation, there is (1) a ‘wrapping’ component that includes creating the mock entities, checking the condition (line 2 in the TBox test example in the figure above, and line 4 in ABox TDD test), returning the TDD test result, and cleaning up afterward; and (2) the interaction with the ontology doing the actual testing, such as querying the ontology and class and instance classification. There are several options to realise component (2) of the TBox TDD tests. The query can be sent to, e.g., OWL-BGP [10] that uses SPARQL-OWL and Hermit to return the answer (line 1), but one also could use just the OWL API and send it to the automated reasoner, among other options.

Because OWL-BGP and the other options didn’t cater for the tests with OWL’s object properties, such as a property chain, so a full implementation would require extending current tools, we decided to first examine performance of the different options for (2) for those tests that could be implemented with current tools so as to get an idea of which approach would be the best to extend, rather than gambling on one, implement all, and go on with user testing. This TDD tool got the unimaginative name TDDonto and can be installed as a Protégé plugin. We tested the performance with 67 TONES ontology repository ontologies. The outcome of that is that the TBox-based SPARQL-OWL approach is faster than the ABox TDD tests (except for class disjointness; see figure below), and the OWL API + reasoner for the TBox TDD tests is again faster in general. These differences are bigger with larger ontologies (see paper for details).

Test computation times per test type (ABox versus TBox-based SPARQL-OWL) and per the kind of the tested axiom (source: [9]).

Finally, can this TDD be simply ‘plugged in’ into one of the existing methodologies? No. As with TDD for software engineering, it has its own sequence of steps. An initial sketch is shown in the figure below. It outlines only the default scenario, where the knowledge to be added wasn’t there already and adding it doesn’t result in conflicts.

Sketch of a possible ontology lifecycle that focuses on TDD, and the steps of the TDD procedure summarised in key terms (source: [9]).

The “select scenario” has to do with what gets fed into the TDD tests, and therewith also where and how TDD could be used. We specified three of them: either (a) the knowledge engineer provides an axiom, (b) a domain expert fills in some template (e.g., the ‘all-some’ one) and that software generates the axiom for the domain ontology (e.g., ), or (c) someone wrote a competency question that is either manually or automatically converted into an axiom. The “refactoring” could include a step for removing a property from a subclass when it is added to its superclass. The “regression testing” considers previous tests and what to do when any conflicts may have arisen (which may need an interaction with step 5).

There is quite a bit of work yet to be done on TDD for ontologies, but at least there is now a first comprehensive basis to work from. Both Agnieszka and I plan to go to ESWC’16, so I hope to see you there. If you want more details or read the tests with a nicer layout than how it is presented in the ESWC16 paper, then have a look at the extended version [11] or contact us, or leave a comment below.

 

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Khan, M.T., Ghidini, C. Ontology Authoring with FORZA. 22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’13). ACM proceedings. Oct. 27 – Nov. 1, 2013, San Francisco, USA. pp569-578.

[2] Ferre, S. and Rudolph, S. (2012). Advocatus diaboli exploratory enrichment of ontologies with negative constraints. In ten Teije, A. et al., editors, 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’12), volume 7603 of LNAI, pages 42-56. Springer. Oct 8-12, Galway, Ireland

[3] Paschke, A., Schaefermeier, R. Aspect OntoMaven – aspect-oriented ontology development and configuration with OntoMaven. Tech. Rep. 1507.00212v1, Free University of Berlin (July 2015)

[4] Blomqvist, E., Sepour, A.S., Presutti, V. Ontology testing — methodology and tool. In: Proc. of EKAW’12. LNAI, vol. 7603, pp. 216-226. Springer (2012)

[5] Vrandecic, D., Gangemi, A. Unit tests for ontologies. In: OTM workshops 2006. LNCS, vol. 4278, pp. 1012-1020. Springer (2006)

[6] Warrender, J.D., Lord, P. How, What and Why to test an ontology. Technical Report 1505.04112, Newcastle University (2015), http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04112

[7] Beck, K.: Test-Driven Development: by example. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA (2004)

[8] Tort, A., Olive, A., Sancho, M.R. An approach to test-driven development of conceptual schemas. Data & Knowledge Engineering 70, 1088-1111 (2011)

[9] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies. 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16). Springer LNCS. 29 May – 2 June, 2016, Crete, Greece. (in print)

[10] Kollia, I., Glimm, B., Horrocks, I. SPARQL Query Answering over OWL Ontologies. In: Proc, of ESWC’11. LNCS, vol. 6643, pp. 382-396. Springer (2011)

[11] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies (extended version). Technical Report, Arxiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.06211. Dec 19, 2015.