A conceptual model for ontology quality assessment

Abstract

With the continuous advancement of methods, tools, and techniques in ontology development, ontologies have emerged in various fields such as machine learning, robotics, biomedical informatics, agricultural informatics, crowdsourcing, database management, and the Internet of Things. Nevertheless, the nonexistence of a universally agreed methodology for specifying and evaluating the quality of an ontology hinders the success of ontology-based systems in such fields as the quality of each component is required for the overall quality of a system and in turn impacts the usability in use. Moreover, a number of anomalies in definitions of ontology quality concepts are visible, and in addition to that, the ontology quality assessment is limited only to a certain set of characteristics in practice even though some other significant characteristics have to be considered for the specified use-case. Thus, in this research, a comprehensive analysis was performed to uncover the existing contributions specifically on ontology quality models, characteristics, and the associated measures of these characteristics. Consequently, the characteristics identified through this review were classified with the associated aspects of the ontology evaluation space. Furthermore, the formalized definitions for each quality characteristic are provided through this study from the ontological perspective based on the accepted theories and standards. Additionally, a thorough analysis of the extent to which the existing works have covered the quality evaluation aspects is presented and the areas further to be investigated are outlined.