Armstrong Relations for Ontology Design and Evaluation

Abstract

Abstract. A challenge in ontology design is to ensure that the ontology accurately represents the application domain and application constraints. Motivating scenarios provide the motivation for the representation choices made during design, and competency questions are subsequently used to evaluate the design. In this paper we show how the notion of Armstrong relations from relational database theory can be used to generate motivating scenarios and competency questions for uniqueness constraints and not null constraints