Abstract:

With the widespread use and the rapid development of ontologies, the structures and semantics of ontologies are becoming more and more complex. The evaluation of the qualities of ontologies becomes a major problem for ontology construction and reuse. In the process of ontology construction, ontology evaluation is beneficial to the reconstruction and optimization of ontologies of high quality. In the reuse process, ontology evaluation can help users to select the optimal structure among the candidate ontologies. In this paper we first propose a set of evaluation metrics to measure the cohesion of the ontologies based on directed acyclic graph (DAG). Then we validate the theoretical effectiveness of the proposed metrics under the frameworks for software measurement validation. Finally, we use a set of classical ontologies to do experiments and the results demonstrate that the proposed metrics are reasonable and effective. It is conducive to the ontology construction and reuse.

Key words: ontology;metrics;cohesion;directed acyclic graph