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