Abstract

Web ontology language (OWL) is one of the last recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop ontologies. The use of OWL ontologies must involve the possibility of the evaluation of quality and correctness. A wide diversity of tools and metrics has been proposed to reach this goal. ONTOMETRIC, OntoQA and Protégé represent the most important tools to evaluate ontologies that usually support metrics. This paper analyses all these tools and makes a proposal to normalize the ontology metrics as a pre-process to apply structural metrics. Also, an OWL-VisMod instrument is introduced as a visual modeling tool with capabilities of metric calculation, especially metrics related to semantics. Nevertheless, it also includes metrics for the schema such as diverse counters for subclasses, object and data type properties and individuals. Finally, diverse visualisations targeted to represent the proposed metrics are included.

Key words: Ontology metrics, ontology construction support tools, ontology visualization, web ontology language, web ontology language -VisMod.