CoQuMa: Demonstration of the Competency Question Manager for Collaborative Ontology Requirements Engineering

Kurzfassung

Competency Questions are at the core of most ontology engineering methodologies. Yet, structuring their elicitation has received rather little attention. Competency Questions are developed in a collaboration of Ontology Engineers and Domain Experts over the course of multiple iterations. Especially with an increasing number of participants, managing the process and its results requires more and more time and resources.

The Competency Question Manager (CoQuMa) is a platform to streamline this process for both, Domain Experts and Ontology Engineers, alike. In a web-based system, Domain Experts can document their own requirements and discuss, prioritise or modify existing Competency Questions. Ontology Engineers can ask for clarifications, provide suggestions for rephrasing, and finally arrange them into consolidated Competency Questions and topics. During the entire process, all contributions and actions are recorded within the system, allowing for tracing the results to initial contributions. CoQuMa allows Ontology Engineers to focus on their core task of structuring and formalising knowledge by considerably reducing the organisational overhead of gathering Competency Questions. For Domain Experts, CoQuMa provides an easy-to-use interface to contribute their knowledge, participate in the process, and review the results during the requirements elicitation and consolidation.