Measuring design complexity of semantic web ontologies

  • Authors:

  • Hongyu Zhang;Yuan-Fang Li;Hee Beng Kuan Tan

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China;School of ITEE, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia;School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Ontology languages such as OWL are being widely used as the Semantic Web movement gains momentum. With the proliferation of the Semantic Web, more and more large-scale ontologies are being developed in real-world applications to represent and integrate knowledge and data. There is an increasing need for measuring the complexity of these ontologies in order for people to better understand, maintain, reuse and integrate them. In this paper, inspired by the concept of software metrics, we propose a suite of ontology metrics, at both the ontology-level and class-level, to measure the design complexity of ontologies. The proposed metrics are analytically evaluated against Weyuker's criteria. We have also performed empirical analysis on public domain ontologies to show the characteristics and usefulness of the metrics. We point out possible applications of the proposed metrics to ontology quality control. We believe that the proposed metric suite is useful for managing ontology development projects.