The TDDonto Tool for Test-Driven Development of DL Knowledge bases

Adding knowledge to an ontology lacks a verification step by the modeller in most cases, other than `try and see what the reasoner says about it'. This is due to the lack of a systematic testbed for ontology authoring. Reusing the notion of {\em Test-Driven Development} (TDD) from software engineering for ontology development resulted in the specification of 42 test types for the $\mathcal{SROIQ}$ language features, as TBox tests using its axioms and as ABox-driven tests with explicitly introduced individuals. We developed TDDOnto, which implements that subset of the TDD tests that could be done by leveraging extant technologies. We examined what the most efficient implementation strategy is with 82 ontologies. The TBox SPARQL queries with OWL-BGP were faster than the ABox-based approach except for disjointness, that effect is more pronounced with larger ontologies, and the OWL API approach is faster than the SPARQL queries for OWL 1 ontologies. A significant difference in performance between OWL and OWL 2 DL ontologies was observed. On average, the TDD tests are faster than classification reasoning, indicating that TDD tests are a promising alternative to the `try and see' approach in ontology authoring