An Experiment in Retrofitting Competency Questions for Existing Ontologies

Abstract

Competency Questions (CQs) are a form of ontology functional requirements expressed as natural language questions. Inspecting CQs together with the axioms in an ontology provides critical insights into the intended scope and applicability of the ontology. CQs also underpin a number of tasks in the development of ontologies e.g. ontology reuse, ontology testing, requirement specification, and the definition of patterns that implement such requirements. Although CQs are integral to the majority of ontology engineering methodologies, the practice of publishing CQs alongside the ontological artefacts is not widely observed by the community.

Topics & Concepts