OLIVAW: ACIMOV's GitHub robot assisting agile collaborative ontology development

TL;DR

OLIVAW provides tooling to operationalize the ACIMOV methodology for agile, collaborative ontology development on GitHub, leveraging W3C standards and continuous validation workflows. It implements model, data, and query tests with Turtle and Markdown reporting, and supports local CLI use, pre-commit checks, and GitHub Actions, all configurable via a template structure and parameters. The framework is demonstrated on multiple ontologies (notably hMAS) and generalized to COSWOT, ACCORD-Project AEC3PO, and INRIA ontologies, highlighting its ability to surface syntax errors and OWL profile incompatibilities and to guide subsequent ontology refinement. This work advances reusable, standards-based tooling for modular, multi-domain ontologies within an AGILE/DevOps-inspired pipeline, with ongoing plans to broaden CI platforms and deployment features beyond GitHub.

Abstract

Agile and collaborative approaches to ontologies design are crucial because they contribute to making them userdriven, up-to-date, and able to evolve alongside the systems they support, hence proper continuous validation tooling is required to ensure ontologies match developers' requirements all along their development. We propose OLIVAW (Ontology Long-lived Integration Via ACIMOV Workflow), a tool supporting the ACIMOV methodology on GitHub. It relies on W3C Standards to assist the development of modular ontologies through GitHub Composite Actions, pre-commit hooks, or a command line interface. OLIVAW was tested on several ontology projects to ensure its usefulness, genericity and reusability. A template repository is available for a quick start. OLIVAW is

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Overview of the ACIMOV methodology hannou:hal-04187236
• Figure 2: Repository structure
• Figure 3: Three complementary executions of tests by OLIVAW
• Figure 4: Turtle reports extracts
• Figure 5: Statistics summary of a markdown report