Applying evaluation criteria to ontology modules

Abstract

Modularity has been increasingly used as a solution to assist with the use and maintenance of large ontologies. However, there is lack of evaluation methods available for determining the quality of an ontology module. While initial work has been done on producing a comprehensive list of evaluation characteristics that can be used to check the quality of a module, certain aspects are still unclear. For instance, the initial list has not been structured into different groups for different types of evaluation criteria. It is also unclear on how to apply these characteristics to a particular module, and the metrics have not been experimentally validated for some types of ontology modules. In this paper, we structure the comprehensive evaluation criteria into groups, provide practical examples on how to use the evaluation characteristics to assess a module, and validate the evaluation characteristics with a set of ontology modules.