Generating Armstrong ABoxes for ALC TBoxes

Abstract

A challenge in ontology engineering is the mismatch in expertise between the ontology engineer and domain expert, which often leads to important constraints not being specified. Domain experts often only focus on specifying constraints that should hold and not on specifying constraints that could possibly be violated. In an attempt to bridge this gap we propose the use of “perfect test data”. The generated test data is perfect in that it satisfies all the constraints of an application domain that are required, including ensuring that the test data violates constraints that can be violated. In the context of Description Logic ontologies we call this test data an “Armstrong ABox”, a notion derived from Armstrong relations in relational database theory. In this paper we detail the theoretical development of Armstrong ABoxes for ALC TBoxes as well as an algorithm for generating such Armstrong ABoxes. The proposed algorithm is based, via the ontology completion algorithm of Baader et al., on attribute exploration in formal concept analysis.