A Consideration of Quality Assurances for Ontology in "Hozo"

Abstract

Recently, ontologies are being constructed in various technical domains. The quality of an ontology is one of the important factors that determines its utility. In order to assure its quality, not only form-based evaluation as to whether the ontology being constructed is written properly in terms of its form (syntax), but also content-based evaluation as to whether the ontology properly represents the target domain, whether the ontology actually serves for problem solving, etc. is necessary. In this study, we consider the quality assurance of ontologies in Hozo, which is an environment for building/using ontologies that is being developed by the authors. As to form-based evaluation, Hozo provides various assistance functions for properly editing an ontology in compliance with several guidelines and rules. As to content-based evaluation, Hozo introduces a method for supporting ontology evaluation thorough conceptual maps which are generated from the ontology according to the user's viewpoints.