Tech Reports

ULCS-08-017

Evaluating Ontology Modules Using an Entropy Inspired Metric

Paul Doran, Valentina Tamma, Ignazio Palmisano, Terry Payne and Luigi Iannone


Abstract

The focus of ontology modularization to date has largely been on the creation of techniques to carry out ontology modularization. This creates a problem in evaluating the results of the different techniques. Ontology modularization techniques cannot solely be evaluated by examining their logical properties. Certain applications of ontology modularization, such as ontology reuse, require a new objective way to evaluate the results. This paper motivates the use of an entropy inspired measure to evaluate ontology modules by arguing that current objective measures of evaluation do not reconcile with the subjective measures employed by Ontology Engineers. Experiments are conducted to show that an entropy based evaluation of ontology modules is beneficial to an Ontology Engineer evaluating the results of ontology module extraction techniques.

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