Dr Maria Keet will present the Department of Computer Science seminar, with a talk entitled, "Test-Driven Development of Ontologies". 

Emerging ontology authoring methods to add knowledge to an ontology focus on ameliorating the validation bottleneck. The verification of the newly added axiom is still one of trying and seeing what the reasoner says, because a systematic testbed for ontology authoring is missing. We sought to address this by introducing the approach of test-driven development for ontology authoring. We specify 42 generic tests, as TBox queries and TBox axioms tested through individuals, and structure their inner workings in an 'open box'-way, which cover the OWL 2 DL language features. This is implemented as a Protege plugin, TDDonto, so that one can perform a TDD test as a black box test. We evaluated the two test approaches on their performance. The TBox queries were faster, and that effect is more pronounced the larger the ontology is, and implementing them with the reasoner only was again faster in general than the query-based approach.

Maria Keet is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She focuses on  knowledge engineering, ontologies, and conceptual modelling, which has resulted in over 85 peer-reviewed publications at venues including KR, ER, EKAW, ESWC, CIKM, and Applied Ontology and DKE. She is PI on a NRF-funded project on a grammar engine for Nguni languages, and was PI on a DST funded project on ontology-driven conceptual modelling and on crowdsourcing an isiZulu terminology, and she was involved in the EU projects TONES, Net2, and e-Lico. She has served in over 45 Program Committees of international workshops and conferences and reviewed for over 20 journals. She is an NRF-rated researcher. She co-chair of the technical committee on education of the IAOA since 2014.  Before her employment at UCT, Maria was Senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and before that, a non-tenured Assistant Professor at the KRDB Research Centre, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. She obtained a PhD in Computer Science at the KRDB Research Centre in 2008, following a BSc(honours) 1st class in IT & Computing from the Open University UK in 2004, and 3.5 years work experience as systems engineer in the IT industry. She also obtained an MSc in Food Science (Microbiology) from Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands, in 1998, and an MA 1st class in Peace & Development Studies from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2003.