OntoQue: Questions for and from Ontologies
2018-presentFunding: various
Introduction and objectives - participants - outputs
Overview
Introduction and backgroundCompetency questions, and questions more generally, have a comparatively long history in relation to ontologies, dating back to the mid-1990s. They can be used in the development of ontologies, educational and trivia quiz questions can be generated from ontologies, and they have been shown to improve question answering systems.
Research and application development has shown over the years that competency questions (CQs) can be useful for ontology development tasks as diverse as scoping, validation, verification, and ontology reuse selection. It is not clear, however which CQs are needed, which ones to use when for what in the design process, how to create good CQs, what good CQs look like, and how they affect ontology development, among others. Further, in ontology's use, such as for educational question generation, questions have arisen concerning what sort of questions can be generated from an ontology, and how, whether they're any better than LLM-generated questions, and to what extent (if at all) the structure of the ontology facilitates or limits question generation.
Aim
The main aim of the project is to increase understanding of the interactions between questions and ontologies such that it results in concrete improvements in ontology design and ontology-driven information systems.
Specific objectives
The specific objectives of the project have been evolving over the years; they are, or did include at some point:
- To develop methods and techniques to simplify authoring good CQs
- To generate ontologies from their specifications as described in CQs, optionally as part of test-driven development methods
- To generate educationally useful questions from ontologies, along with their pre-computed answers, as one of the 'not design' uses of CQs
Participants, collaborators, and contributors
Over the timspan of the project, collaborators include(d):- Maria Keet, UCT
- Zubeida Khan, CSIR, South Africa
- Zola Mahlaza, UCT
- Agnieszka Lawrynowicz, PUT Poznan, Poland
- Jedrzej Potoniec, PUT Poznan, Poland
- Toky Raboanary, UCT (PhD student, 2019-)
- Mary-Jane Antia, UCT (PhD student 2019-)
- Dawid Wisniewski, PhD student at PUT Poznan, Poland
- César Bernabé, PhD student at Leiden UMC, The Netherlands
- Steve Wang, BSc(hons) student and research assistant, UCT
- Chiadika Emeruem, research assistant, UCT
Outputs
- Publications
- Bernabé, C.H., Keet, C.M., Khan, Z.C., Mahlaza, Z. A method to improve alignments between domain and foundational ontologies. 13th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2023 (FOIS'23). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 377, 125-139. 18-20 July Sherbrooke, Canada. DISTINGUISHED PAPER AWARD
- Antia, M.-J., Keet, C.M. Automating the Generation of Competency Questions for Ontologies with AgOCQs. 5th Iberoamerican conference on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web (KGSWC'23). F. Ortiz-Rodriguez et al. (Eds.). Springer LNCS vol 14382, 1-15. 13-15 Nov 2023, Zaragoza, Spain.
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Raboanary, T., Wang, S., Keet, C.M. Towards the generalisation of the generation of answerable questions from ontologies for education. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2023, 16(1):86-103.
- Raboanary, T., Keet, C.M. An Architecture for Generating Questions, Answers, and Feedback from Ontologies. 16th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR'22), Garoufallou, E., Vlachidis, A. (eds). 7 Nov - 10 Nov. London, UK. Springer CCIS vol 1789, pp135-147. 2023.
- Emeruem, C., Keet, C.M., Khan, Z.C., Wang, S. BFO Classifier: Aligning domain ontologies to BFO. FOUST-VI: 6th Workshop on Foundational Ontology, part of JOWO'22. Prince Sales, T., Hedblom, M. and Tan, H. (Eds). CEUR-WS vol 3249. 13p. 15-19 August, Jonkoping, Sweden 2022.
- Raboanary, T., Wang, S., Keet, C.M. Generating Answerable Questions from Ontologies for Educational Exercises. 15th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR'21). Garoufallou, E., Ovalle-Perandones, M-A., Vlachidis, A (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 1537, 28-40. 29 Nov - 3 Dec, online.
- Antia, M.-J., Keet, C.M. Assessing and Enhancing Bottom-up CNL Design for Competency Questions for Ontologies. 7th International Workshop on Controlled Natural language (CNL'21), 8-9 Sept. 2021, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ACL, 1.11.
- Mahlaza, Z., Keet, C.M. OWLSIZ: An isiZulu CNL for structured knowledge validation. 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web (WebNLG'20), ACL, pp15-25. 18 Dec 2020, Dublin, Ireland.
- Potoniec, J., Wisniewski, D., Lawrynowicz, A., Keet, C.M. Dataset of Ontology Competency Questions to SPARQL-OWL Queries Translations. Data in Brief, 2020, 29: 105098.
- Wisniewski, D., Potoniec, J., Lawrynowicz, A., Keet, C.M. Analysis of Ontology Competency Questions and their Formalisations in SPARQL-OWL. Journal of Web Semantics, 2019, 59:100534.
- Keet, C.M., Mahlaza, Z., Antia, M.-J. CLaRO: a Controlled Language for Authoring Competency Questions. 13th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR'19). E. Garoufallou et al. (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 1057, 3-15. 28-31 Oct 2019, Rome, Italy. BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD
- Wisniewski, D., Potoniec, J., Lawrynowicz, A. Keet, C.M. Competency Questions and SPARQL-OWL Queries Dataset and Analysis. Technical Report 1811.09529. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.09529. November 2018.
- Theses and projects
- Nervesh Naidoo: Generating Adaptive Questions to Assess a Learner Using an Ontology. BSc honours [4th year] project report. University of Cape Town. 2023.
- Steve Wang: Ontology Specifications to Generate Questions. BSc honours project. University of Cape Town. 2019.
- Chiadika Emeruem and Steve Wang. BFO Classifier (version 1). Ontology Engineering Course and DOT4D project on open educational resources, 2021.
- Presentations
- TBA
- Other dissemination
- ROQCS (temporary link)
- Code
- BFO 2 Classifier v2, on GitHub
- BFO 2 Classifier user guide
- BFO 2 Classifier v1 on Github
- Blog posts, most of which describe informally the content of the papers:
- **Improved** — the BFO Classifier; 29 June 2023
- Only answering competency questions is not enough to evaluate your ontology; 8 June 2022
- BFO decision diagram and alignment tool; 10 Dec 2021
- Progress on generating educational questions from ontologies; 6 Nov 2021
- CLaRO v2.0: A larger CNL for competency questions for ontologies; 6 Aug 2021
- A set of competency questions and SPARQL-OWL queries, with analysis; 9 Jan 2020
- A controlled language for competency questions; 4 Sept 2019