Providing tool support for unit testing in eXtreme Design

The evaluation of an ontology is a crucial and occasionally overlooked step of the ontology development process. The evaluation can happen in different stages of the development, on different layers, such as lexical, taxonomic, semantic relations, context/application, syntactic, and structural layers, and by different people’s roles, depending on the ontology development methodology. A widespread issue regarding the evaluation of ontologies is the lack of tools to support these methodologies. In the eXtreme Design methodology, the ontology evaluation is a central part of the process, which focuses on assessing whether the requirements, either data-driven or story-driven, have been fulfilled by the ontology module. Momentarily, there is only a jar that provides support for the execution of test cases, but there is no support for other aspects of the evaluation process. This paper presents the progress of the development of tool support which provides semi-automated management for unit testing of owl ontologies on GitHub by means of developed-from-scratch actions and based on the Continuous Integration practice. The fundamental features that are currently developed in the tool are: 1) Setup of the testing environment, 2) Crosscheck and parsing of the ontology tester input, 3) Construction and automatic execution of the unit test, and 4) Documentation of the unit test. The evaluation of the tool itself has been prepared and we expect to have a list of new functional and non-functional requirements as well as identification of bugs or refinement of the existing features.