Terry Payne

Reham Alharbi, Valentina Tamma, Floriana Grasso et al.

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. In this context, we present an experiment in retrofitting CQs from existing ontologies. We propose RETROFIT-CQs, a method to extract candidate CQs directly from ontologies using Generative AI. In the paper we present the pipeline that facilitates the extraction of CQs by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and we discuss its application to a number of existing ontologies.

Enrico Daga, Valentina Tamma, Terry Payne

Knowledge graphs have become the primary vehicle for data integration and are critical to the success of modern AI, but the diversity of KG modelling practices, from lightweight vocabularies to richly axiomatised ontologies, makes integration and reuse expensive and brittle. This challenge is particularly acute in neuro-symbolic AI, where bridging neural and symbolic components depends on the ability to reengineer KGs to fit new requirements; GenAI now offers unprecedented automation capability, but without a principled understanding of the KG space, such automation remains conceptually ungrounded. We introduce the ontological continuum as that missing conceptualisation, a theoretical construct a theoretical construct whose characterisation framework is defined by two orthogonal distinctions: semantics vs pragmatics, and properties vs affordances; together these define a vocabulary to describe, compare, navigate, and transform KGs across the full range of modelling practices. The methodological stance is empirical: rather than prescribing how KGs should be modelled, the continuum aims to define a theory of the existent, derived from observation of real-world KG engineering practices and whose structure can be made formally explicit, for example, through Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We ground the vision through a case study on provenance knowledge, showing how a single concern manifests differently across the continuum. We articulate five open research challenges and invite the community to develop the ontological continuum as a shared research agenda.