A Quality Assurance Workflow for Ontologies Based on Semantic Regularities

While syntactic regularities or syntactic patterns, which are sets of axioms in an OWL ontology with a repeating structure, can help to understand the authoring style of an ontology and identify regular design, they can lack uniformity as they are sensitive to syntactic variations in asserted axioms. Cluster analysis of the implicit information provided by an OWL DL reasoner can contribute to the detection of semantic patterns in an ontology. This provides additional benefits with respect to syntactic patterns. Using SNOMED-CT, we demonstrate how the detection of semantic regularities and irregularities in patterns of entailments can be used in ontology quality assurance. We evaluate and discuss the results of semantic patterns inspection and we compare them against existing work on the detection of syntactic regularities. We use a systematic extraction of lexical and entailment patterns and present a quality assurance workflow that combines lexical patterns and semantic patterns, discussing the potential advantages of incorporating it into future authoring tools.