A Method for Evaluating Ontologies

My dissertation work was focused on developing a method for evaluating and standardizing ontologies, based on an integration of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and OntoClean [1]. The primary objective is to help standardize the creation of ontologies for the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, for which BFO is the chosen upper ontology, given that there are no formal criteria that candidate domain ontologies must meet for ratification into the OBO Foundry. In this project I integrated BFO with the three primary components of OntoClean: Rigidity, Identity, and Unity. The axioms that resulted from the integration of BFO with OntoClean’s notion of Rigidity serves as a foundation for a decision-tree implemented within a prototype Protégé plugin for assisting a modeler in evaluating classes she introduces into an ontology, one at a time.