Towards an automatic SPARQL query generation from ontology competency questions

Abstract

Ontologies are omnipresent and are actively used as explicit, formal, and consensual knowledge representations. Hence, ensuring ontological quality is considered a crucial issue. One of the well-known domain ontologies validation approaches proposes a set of competency questions, covering the domain represented by the ontology, translating these questions into SPARQL queries, running them on the ontology, and comparing the obtained results with the expected ones. This paper presents an approach to translate natural language competency questions into SPARQL queries to assist domain experts in testing ontologies and users considering exploring ontologies for further exploitation. The implementation and experimentation of the proposed approach are described. The resulting tool proposes a fully automatic and semi-automatic execution, enabling end-users to parameter the approach phases.