2015/05/15 by Jennifer D. Warrender, Warrender, Jennifer D., Phillip Lord +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computational Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Finance #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques #and Science (cs.CE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1505.04112
openalex publication_date 2015/05/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Ontology development relates to software development in that they both involve the production of formal computational knowledge. It is possible, therefore, that some of the techniques used in software engineering could also be used for ontologies; for example, in software engineering testing is a well-established process, and part of many different methodologies. The application of testing to ontologies, therefore, seems attractive. The Karyotype Ontology is developed using the novel Tawny-OWL library. This provides a fully programmatic environment for ontology development, which includes a complete test harness. In this paper, we describe how we have used this harness to build an extensive series of tests as well as used a commodity continuous integration system to link testing deeply into our development process; this environment, is applicable to any OWL ontology whether written using Tawny-OWL or not. Moreover, we present a novel analysis of our tests, introducing a new classification of what our different tests are. For each class of test, we describe why we use these tests, also by comparison to software tests. We believe that this systematic comparison between ontology and software development will help us move to a more agile form of ontology development.