Metrics for ontologies

The success of the Semantic Web has been linked with the use of ontologies on the Semantic Web. Given the important role of ontologies on the Semantic Web, the need for domain ontology development and management are increasingly more and more important to most kinds of knowledge-driven applications. More and more these ontologies are being used for information exchange. Information exchange technology should foster knowledge exchange by providing tools to automatically assess the characteristics and quality of an ontology. The scarcity of theoretically and empirically validated measures for ontologies has motivated our investigation. From this investigation a suite of quality metrics have been developed and implemented as a plugin to the ontology editor Protege so that any ontology specified in a standard web ontology language such as RDFS or OWL may have a quality assessment analysis performed.