A framework for syntactic and semantic quality evaluation of ontologies

Abstract

The increasing focus on Web 3.0 is leading to automated creation and enrichment of ontologies and other linked datasets. Alongside automation, quality evaluation of enriched ontologies can impact software reliability and reuse. Current quality evaluation approaches oftentimes seek to evaluate ontologies in either syntactic (degree of following ontology development guidelines) or semantic (degree of semantic validity of enriched concepts/relations) aspects. This paper proposes an ontology quality evaluation framework consisting of: (a) SynEvaluator and (b) SemValidator for evaluating syntactic and semantic aspects of ontologies respectively. SynEvaluator allows dynamic task-specific creation and updation of syntactic rules at run-time without any need for programming. SemValidator uses Twitter-based expertise of validators for semantic evaluation. The efficacy and validity of the framework is shown empirically on multiple ontologies.