Themis: a tool for validating ontologies through requirements

Abstract

The validation of ontologies, whose aim is to check whether an ontology matches the conceptualization it is meant to specify, is a key activity for guaranteeing the quality of ontologies. This work is focused on the validation through requirements, with the aim of assuring, both the domain experts and ontology developers, that the ontologies they are building or using are complete regarding their needs. Inspired by software engineering testing processes, this work proposes a web-based tool called Themis, independent of any ontology development environment, for validating ontologies by means of the application of test expressions which, following lexicosyntactic patterns, represent the desired behaviour that will present an ontology if a requirement is satisfied.

DABGEO: A reusable and usable global energy ontology for the energy domain

“…In addition, with respect to OEMA it reduced the ontology reuse time and adaptation changes, facilitating the ontology reuse process. As future work, in the DABGEO home page we plan to integrate algorithms that semi-automatically check whether a set of ontologies meet specific requirements [33]. These algorithms would help to reduce the understanding effort that DABGEO requires due to its large number of modules.…”

SARGON – Smart energy domain ontology

“…For example, OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner (OOPS!) [49] to detect the presence of errors which are occurred in design time, Themis [50] to check the validation of requirements, Hermit or Pellet to check the consistency.…”

The SAREF Pipeline and Portal—An Ontology Verification Framework

“…The logs are formatted in HTML in the GUI and markdown in the CLI, which is convenient to create nicelyformatted issues rapidly to collaboratively deal with problems. 16 In addition, a log file in the JUnit report format is generated, which can be used by GitLab to provide an overview of the issues in Merge Requests. 17…”

“…Requirements (requirements.csv file) and tests (tests.csv file) are sent to the Themis service [16] which automatically generates OWL Axioms based on Lexico-Syntactic patterns analysis of the tests, and checks that the ontology contains the generated axioms.…”