OntoChat: A Framework for Conversational Ontology Engineering

OntoChat is a framework designed to support ontology requirements engineering through conversational interactions. It facilitates requirement elicitation, analysis, and testing, enabling users to interact with a conversational agent to guide the creation of use cases and the extraction of competency questions. The framework provides computational tools for analyzing requirements and testing preliminary versions of ontologies, enhancing the overall efficiency and accuracy of ontology development. OntoChat has been evaluated through a replication of the engineering efforts behind the Music Meta Ontology. Its ontology user story generation functions are publicly hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. For the best experience, Google Chrome is recommended for interaction.

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Deployment Instructions

1. Set Up Your Environment

   • Ensure you have Python 3.11 or higher installed.

2. Install Dependencies

   • Download the required dependencies:

     pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the Application

   • Start the OntoChat framework using Gradio:

     Gradio app.py

Authors and attribution

@inproceedings{zhang2024ontochat,
  title={OntoChat: A Framework for Conversational Ontology Engineering Using Language Models},
  author={Zhang, Bohui and Carriero, Valentina Anita and Schreiberhuber, Katrin and Tsaneva, Stefani and Gonz{\'a}lez, Luc{\'i}a S{\'a}nchez and Kim, Jongmo and de Berardinis, Jacopo},
  booktitle={Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC2024. Hersonissos, Greece},
  volume={15344},
  pages={102--121},
  year={2024}
}

@inproceedings{zhao2024improving,
  title={Improving Ontology Requirements Engineering with OntoChat and Participatory Prompting},
  author={Zhao, Yihang and Zhang, Bohui and Hu, Xi and Ouyang, Shuyin and Kim, Jongmo and Jain, Nitisha and de Berardinis, Jacopo and Mero{\~n}o-Pe{\~n}uela, Albert and Simperl, Elena},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series},
  volume={4},
  number={1},
  pages={253--257},
  year={2024}
}

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the following support:

• This project is co-funded by Polifonia under grant agreement No. 101004746 as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2014-2020 research and innovation programme.
• This project is co-funded by MuseIT under grant agreement No. 101061441 as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2021-2027 research and innovation programme.
• This project is co-funded by SIEMENS AG and the Technical University of Munich, Institute for Advanced Study, Germany.

We also thank all the evaluators that contributed feedback on the effectiveness of the tool and provided their experience of use.

License

Copyright 2024 OntoChat maintainers

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.