FOCA: A Methodology for Ontology Evaluation

Modeling an ontology is a hard and time-consuming task. Although methodologies are useful for ontologists to create good ontologies, they do not help with the task of evaluating the quality of the ontology to be reused. For these reasons, it is imperative to evaluate the quality of the ontology after constructing it or before reusing it. Few studies usually present only a set of criteria and questions, but no guidelines to evaluate the ontology. The effort to evaluate an ontology is very high as there is a huge dependence on the evaluator’s expertise to understand the criteria and questions in depth. Moreover, the evaluation is still very subjective. This study presents a novel methodology for ontology evaluation, taking into account three fundamental principles: i) it is based on the Goal, Question, Metric approach for empirical evaluation; ii) the goals of the methodologies are based on the roles of knowledge representations combined with specific evaluation criteria; iii) each ontology is evaluated according to the type of ontology. The methodology was empirically evaluated using different ontologists and ontologies of the same domain. The main contributions of this study are: i) defining a step-by-step approach to evaluate the quality of an ontology; ii) proposing an evaluation based on the roles of knowledge representations; iii) the explicit difference of the evaluation according to the type of the ontology iii) a questionnaire to evaluate the ontologies; iv) a statistical model that automatically calculates the quality of the ontologies.