ON ESTABLISHING AN ONTOLOGY REENGINEERING FRAMEWORK

A set of ontology evaluation criteria are specified in this paper in order to ensure that existing ontologies adhere to a set of requirements in order to be reusable in various contexts. The proposed evaluation criteria are designed in principle to provide the means for the improvement of existing ontologies and the development of new ones with efficient structure, increased readability and limited redundancy. Existing ontologies play a useful role in the development of new ones, because authoring ontologies from scratch is a costly and non-trivial task. On the other hand, reusing existing ontologies may save significant effort and helps interacting with different development tools. Based on practical experience, as well as existing ontology evaluation methodologies, we propose a set of specifications that should be taken into account at any ontology authoring or restructuring process. On top of this, we define a set of evaluation metrics in order to quantitatively assess the improvement that is potentially achieved by the application of the refinement process. The generalization of the application of the proposed criteria on a large-scale basis is the next step to establish an integrated ontology evaluation framework.