User Extensible System to Identify Problems in OWL Ontologies and SWRL Rules

The Semantic Web uses ontologies to associate meaning to Web content so machines can process it. One inherent problem to this approach is that, as its popularity increases, there is an ever growing number of ontologies available to be used, leading to difficulties in choosing appropriate ones. With that in mind, we created a system that allows users to evaluate ontologies/rules. It is composed by the Metadata description For Ontologies/Rules (MetaFOR), an ontology in OWL, and a tool to convert any OWL ontology to MetaFOR. With the MetaFOR version of an ontology, it is possible to use SWRL rules to identify anomalies in it. These can be problems already documented in the literature or user defined ones. SWRL is familiar to users, so it is easier to define new project specific anomalies. We present a case study where the system detects 9 problems, from the literature, and two user defined ones.