Software Testing Techniques Revisited for OWL Ontologies

peer reviewedOntologies are an essential component of semantic knowledge bases and applications, and nowadays they are used in a plethora of domains. Despite the maturity of ontology languages, support tools and engineering techniques, the testing and validation of ontologies is a field which still lacks consolidated approaches and tools. This paper attempts at partly bridging that gap, taking a first step towards the extension of some traditional software testing techniques to ontologies expressed in a widely-used format. Mutation testing and coverage testing, revisited in the light of the peculiar features of the ontology language and structure, can can assist in designing better test suites to validate them, and overall help in the engineering and refinement of ontologies and software based on them