A Method to Develop Description Logic Ontologies Iteratively with Automatic Requirement Traceability

ABSTRACT. Competency Questions (CQs) play an important role in the ontology development life-cycle, as they represent the ontology requirements. Although the main methodologies use them, there is room for improvement in the current practice of ontology engineering. One of the main problems is the lack of tools to check if CQs defined in OWL, are being fulfilled by an ontology, preferably in an automated way. Moreover, requirement (or CQ) traceability is rarely explored. Recently there has been a trend on checking CQs against ontologies using RDF and SPARQL. Naturally, this language, being created for Semantic Networks, is inadequate to check the fulfillment of OWL CQs. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic, full-fledged method to develop ontologies iteratively, using CQs as requirements. It presents many novelties: a tracer to monitor the relations among CQs and the OWL code; an NLP component that translates CQs in natural language into OWL queries; a logic checker that confirms whether CQs are satisfied or not; a generator of new CQs, which comes into play when the CQ being dealt is not satisfied yet; and an axiom generator that suggests to the user new axioms to be included in the ontology.