Verifying Description Logic Ontologies based on Competency Questions and Unit Testing

Ontology testing can help guarantee ontology quality, by finding errors and inconsistencies in the ontology. There are few approaches for ontology testing inspired in methods employed by software engineering, and usually they depart from software requirements. Requirements in ontologies are the set of competency questions. A drawback of some ontology testing approaches resides on the fact that testing takes place only at the assertional level, since the query language SPARQL is relied on. In this work, we propose an approach and its implementation to test semi-automatically OWL-DL ontologies with both assertional and terminological queries, by using competency questions and the concept of unit testing. The tests accomplished in small ontologies sounds promising with good results.