An ontology analysis tool

Abstract

The success of the Semantic Web has been linked with the use of ontologies on the Semantic Web. Given the important role of ontologies on the Semantic Web, the need for domain ontology development and management are becoming more and more important to most kinds of knowledge-driven applications. Numerous proposed approaches to evaluating an ontology depend on the purpose of evaluation. Some tools evaluate ontologies for correctness, completeness and redundancy so that applications do not use poorly or incorrectly formulated ontologies; others have developed methodologies to ensure the consistency and completeness of an ontology throughout its entire lifetime. Recent proposals by researchers also suggest the importance of tools to help analyze ontologies for re-use by consumers. The scarcity of theoretically and empirically validated measures for consumer analysis of ontologies has motivated our research to develop an ontological analysis tool that can be used on both intensional and extensional ontologies. The suite of metrics that are being developed and implemented as a plug-in to the Protégé, ontology editor experimental results on two existing ontologies, WordNet and UMLS and our plans to continue validation of this tool on other ontologies such as UNSPSC and eCl@ss from the e-commerce domain are discussed.

Keywords:

• ontology evaluation
• ontology re-use
• content analysis
• structure analysis
• information content
• Protégé plug-in

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge implementation assistance from Ramanathan Somasundaram and the timely assistance and advice of David Duke whose graph visualization library was used to produce the information visualization of hub concepts.