# The African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontologies: requirements, design, and content

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Discerning and Characterising Types of Competency Questions for Ontologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13688/) (2024)
- [Bench4KE: Benchmarking Automated Competency Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24554/) (2025)
- [BigCQ: A large-scale synthetic dataset of competency question patterns formalized into SPARQL-OWL query templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09574/) (2021)
- [Evaluating the Fitness of Ontologies for the Task of Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07994/) (2025)
- [VSPO: Validating Semantic Pitfalls in Ontology via LLM-Based CQ Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07991/) (2025)
- [CQ4OE: A benchmark for assessing LLM-assisted ontology generation from competency questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26029/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Background. Most tutorial ontologies focus on illustrating one aspect of ontology development, notably language features and automated reasoners, but ignore ontology development factors, such as emergent modelling guidelines and ontological principles. Yet, novices replicate examples from the exercises they carry out. Not providing good examples holistically causes the propagation of sub-optimal ontology development, which may negatively affect the quality of a real domain ontology. Results. We identified 22 requirements that a good tutorial ontology should satisfy regarding subject domain, logics and reasoning, and engineering aspects. We developed a set of ontologies about African Wildlife to serve as tutorial ontologies. A majority of the requirements have been met with the set of African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontologies, which are introduced in this paper. The African Wildlife Ontology is mature and has been used yearly in an ontology engineering course or tutorial since 2010 and is included in a recent ontology engineering textbook with relevant examples and exercises. Conclusion. The African Wildlife Ontology provides a wide range of options concerning examples and exercises for ontology engineering well beyond illustrating only language features and automated reasoning. It assists in demonstrating tasks about ontology quality, such as alignment to a foundational ontology and satisfying competency questions, versioning, and multilingual ontologies.