OntoChat Assistant for User Story Generation in Ontology Engineering

An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation, which can be combined with problem-solving methods and reasoning functionality to develop high-quality technology and application systems efficiently. Ontology engineering (OE) typically involves extensive manual effort to elicit intended use cases (user stories) from users for the target ontology-based systems. Recent studies have demonstrated the positive potential of Large Language Model (LLM)-based conversational agents in supporting user story generation in OE. However, we argue that we are not leveraging LLM to its fullest potential by not supporting users in formulating effective prompts. To address this, we identify the prompt guidance users need during user story generation workflows by conducting a formative study (N = 10) using participatory prompting. We demonstrate its usefulness through the design and development of the OntoChat LLM-based system for OE, as well as a user evaluation with knowledge engineers (N = 24). To our knowledge, this is the first work to design and validate a prompt guidance framework that helps users leverage LLM to its fullest potential to generate effective requirements for ontology development. This advances how we interact with LLM for requirements elicitation.