ICBO_2018_31: Test-driven Ontology Development in Protégé

Over the past decade, various quality assurance methodologies have emerged in the field of software engineering for preventing, detecting, and fixing faults and bugs in software. In particular, Test-driven Development (TDD) is now a popular quality assurance technique whereby extensive usage of test cases can be used to enforce the correctness of software artifacts. While testing has made its way into the field of ontology engineering, where some techniques for testing ontologies are now used in prominent biomedical ontology projects, Test-driven Development has yet to achieve significant uptake. In this paper we propose a Logic-Based Test-driven Ontology Development methodology, which takes cues from Test-Driven Development in the field of software engineering. Our hope is that this will encourage a "test-first" approach to ontology engineering and that it will form part of the arsenal available to ontology engineers in order to help them produce and maintain high quality ontologies. Test cases in our framework are represented by simple statements describing expected and/or unwanted logical consequences of an intended ontology. As with Test-driven Development in software engineering, our approach encourages small, frequent iterations in the testing and development life-cycle. We provide and present tool support for our approach in the form of OntoDebug –- a plug-in for the ontology editor Protégé.