ICBO_2018_9: A Protégé Plug-In for Test-Driven Ontology Development

<p>Ontology development is a hard and often error-prone process, which requires ontology authors to correctly express their domain knowledge in a formal language. One way to ensure the quality of the resulting ontology is to use test cases, similarly to the best practices in software development. For ontology development, test cases can be specified as statements describing expected and/or unwanted logical consequences of an ontology. However, verifying the test cases and identifying the ontology parts that cause their violation is a complex task, which requires appropriate tool support. In this demo, we present OntoDebug – a plug-in for the Protégé editor – that supports test-driven ontology development. OntoDebug can automatically verify whether the ontology satisfies all defined test cases. If any test case is violated, the plug-in assists the user in debugging and repairing the ontology in an interactive way. The plug-in asks a series of questions about the ontology to pinpoint the faulty axioms. Once a fault is repaired, all answers that the author provided in the interactive debugging session may be converted into test cases, thus preserving the additional knowledge, which can be used in future testing of the ontology.</p>