The African wildlife ontology tutorial ontologies

C Maria Keet

doi:10.1186/s13326-020-00224-y

Abstract

BackgroundMost tutorial ontologies focus on illustrating one aspect of ontology development, notably language features and automated reasoners, but ignore ontology development factors, such as emergent modelling guidelines and ontological principles. Yet, novices replicate examples from the exercise they carry out. Not providing good examples holistically causes the propagation of sub-optimal ontology development, which may negatively affect the quality of a real domain ontology.ResultsWe identified 22 requirements that a good tutorial ontology should satisfy regarding subject domain, logics and reasoning, and engineering aspects. We developed a set of ontologies about African Wildlife to serve as tutorial ontologies. A majority of the requirements have been met with the set of African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontologies, which are introduced in this paper. The African Wildlife Ontology is mature and has been used yearly in an ontology engineering course or tutorial since 2010 and is included in a recent ontology engineering textbook with relevant examples and exercises.ConclusionThe African Wildlife Ontology provides a wide range of options concerning examples and exercises for ontology engineering well beyond illustrating just language features and automated reasoning. It assists in demonstrating tasks concerning ontology quality, such as alignment to a foundational ontology and satisfying competency questions, versioning, and multilingual ontologies.

Highlights

Most tutorial ontologies focus on illustrating one aspect of ontology development, notably language features and automated reasoners, but ignore ontology development factors, such as emergent modelling guidelines and ontological principles
The two most popular tutorial ontologies are about wine and pizza, which are not ideal introductory subject domains on closer inspection, they are limited to Web ontology language (OWL) DL only, and are over 15 years old Correspondence: mkeet@cs.uct.ac.za Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, 18 University Avenue, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa neither taking into consideration the more recent insights in ontology engineering nor the OWL 2 standard with its additional features
The paper introduced the African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontologies, which is a set of ontologies used for a variety of ontology development examples and exercises

Summary

Introduction

Most tutorial ontologies focus on illustrating one aspect of ontology development, notably language features and automated reasoners, but ignore ontology development factors, such as emergent modelling guidelines and ontological principles. The two most popular tutorial ontologies are about wine and pizza, which are not ideal introductory subject domains on closer inspection (discussed below), they are limited to OWL DL only, and are over 15 years old Considering subject domains in the most closely related area, conceptual modelling for relational databases, there is a small set of universes of discourse that are used in teaching throughout the plethora of teaching materials available: the video/DVD/book rentals, employees at a company, a university, and, to a lesser extent, flights and airplanes Neither of these topics for databases lend themselves well for ontologies, for the simple reason that the two have different purposes. It does raise the question as to what would be suitable and, more fundamentally, what it is that makes some subject domain suitable but not another, and, underlying that, what the requirements are for an ontology to be a good tutorial ontology

Results

Discussion

Conclusion