An entropy inspired measure for evaluating ontology modularization

• Authors: Paul S. Doran;Valentina Tamma;Terry R. Payne;Ignazio Palmisano
• Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Knowledge capture
• Year: 2009

Ontology modularization has received growing interest from the research community lately, since it supports tasks such as ontology design/reuse and knowledge selection and integration. Most of the research efforts have concentrated on approaches to extract modules, or generate partitions from an ontology. However these approaches are influenced by different definitions of ontology modularization and thus tend to vary w.r.t. the concepts and properties in the ontology that should define the module, and on the characteristics that modules should exhibit, which often depend on the task for which the modularization process is performed. This diversity of approaches makes the comparative evaluation of the output of different modularization processes hard to perform. In this paper, we propose an entropy inspired measure for modularization, Integrated Ontology Entropy, that approximates the information content of modules, and hence provides a profile for the module generated. This measure is independent of the modularization technique used, and is calculated as a function of the number of edges connecting the named concepts in the ontology, when a graph representation of the ontology is utilized. In the paper we apply this measure to different modularization techniques and we empirically show how the measure captures different characteristics of modules, such as the degree of redundancy and the level of connectedness.