Domain Modeling for the Semantic Web: Assessing the Pragmatics of Ontologies

The Semantic Web requires the ability to express information in a precise-interpretable form so that software sharing data can also gain an understanding of the meaning of the terms describing the data. Referred to as the third component of the Semantic Web, ontologies are the means by which separate web components can share a common language and communicate in order to work together efficiently. However, there is a lack of understanding of ontology quality, specifically as it relates to selecting or creating an ontology for a Semantic Web application. Quality assessment systems are needed which include a way to assess the pragmatics, or usefulness, of a domain ontology for its intended purpose. This research analyzes the pragmatics of domain ontologies with respect to consistency, coverage, and usability to derive a set of evaluation metrics, which are represented in a framework. An empirical evaluation illustrates the usefulness of the metrics.