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EffTE: A dependency-aware approach for test-driven ontology development

Abstract:

The development of domain-specific ontologies requires joint efforts among different groups of stakeholders, such as ontology engineers and domain experts. By following a test-driven development technique, a set of test cases ensures that ontology changes do not violate predefined requirements. However, since the number of test cases can be large and their evaluation time may be high, the ontology development process can be negatively impacted. We propose EffTE, an approach for efficient test-driven ontology development relying on a graph-based model of dependencies between test cases. It enables prioritization and selection of test cases to be evaluated. Traversing the dependency graph is realized using breadth-first search along with a mechanism that tracks tabu test cases, i.e., test cases to be ignored for further evaluation due to faulty parent test cases. As a result, the number of evaluated test cases is minimized, thus reducing the time required for validating the ontology after each modification. We conducted an empirical evaluation to determine the efficiency of our approach. The evaluation results suggest that our approach is more efficient than an exhaustive evaluation of the test cases; in particular with an increasing ontology size and number of test cases.