Automatically Drafting Ontologies from Competency Questions with FrODO
This addresses the need for automated ontology design tools for engineers in agile methodologies, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing FRED technology.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically drafting ontologies from competency questions expressed in natural language, presenting FrODO, a method that leverages frame semantics to produce domain ontologies, with a user study showing it is effective and yields qualitative drafts.
We present the Frame-based ontology Design Outlet (FrODO), a novel method and tool for drafting ontologies from competency questions automatically. Competency questions are expressed as natural language and are a common solution for representing requirements in a number of agile ontology engineering methodologies, such as the eXtreme Design (XD) or SAMOD. FrODO builds on top of FRED. In fact, it leverages the frame semantics for drawing domain-relevant boundaries around the RDF produced by FRED from a competency question, thus drafting domain ontologies. We carried out a user-based study for assessing FrODO in supporting engineers for ontology design tasks. The study shows that FrODO is effective in this and the resulting ontology drafts are qualitative.