Abstract

Ontologies, i.e., conceptualized and formalized representations of knowledge, provide the backbone of the semantic web and other knowledge-based applications. Interestingly, there has been little research considering ontologies as the basis for software and system testing. In this talk, we discuss previous research work on ontology-based testing and introduce a more recently developed framework enabling the extraction of test cases from ontologies. In particular, we focus on formal representations of the software or system’s environment. This approach reverses the ordinary view on test case generation, where usually tests are obtained considering the knowledge of the software and systems. The rationale behind switching from a system-centric to an environment-centric view is that for many applications, all potential interactions between systems and their environment can hardly be considered. Hence, it is likely to miss critical interactions, which, as a consequence, lead to unsafe systems. In addition to the background and foundations, we present the current state of the art of ontology-based testing, including algorithms and experimental results, which indicate the practicability of the testing approach.

Speaker

Professor Franz Wotawa Austria

Professor and Head
Institute of Software Technology

Graz University of Technology

Franz Wotawa received an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1994) and a Ph.D. in 1996, both from the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently a professor of software engineering at the Graz University of Technology. From 2003 to 2009, and starting in 2020, Franz Wotawa has been the head of the Institute of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include model-based and qualitative reasoning, theorem proving, mobile robots, verification and validation, and software testing and debugging. Besides theoretical foundations, he has always wanted to close the gap between research and practice. For this purpose, he founded Softnet Austria in 2006, a non-profit organization conducting applied research projects with companies. From October 2017 to 2024, Franz Wotawa was the head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Quality Assurance Methodologies for Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems. Franz Wotawa is the author and co-author of more than 500 peer-reviewed papers for journals, books, conferences, and workshops during his career. He supervised 110 master’s and 47 Ph.D. students. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Diagnosis Community (DX) for his work on diagnosis in 2016. Franz Wotawa has been a member of various program committees and has organized several workshops and special issues of journals. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence, and a Senior Member of the AAAI.