Using Meta Models for the Comparison of Ontologies

Ontologies are of increasing popularity for the evaluation of modelling methods in Systems Analysis and Design. However, at this stage only limited guidance is provided regarding the selection and evaluation of ontologies. The aim of this paper is to propose meta models for evaluating, comparing and engineering ontologies. It discusses an approach for analysing and evaluating the meta models of two well-known ontologies that had been used previously in Systems Analysis and Design research – the BWW representation model and Chisholm’s ontology. Our approach provides a theoretical evaluation technique for evaluating ontologies according to their equivalence, depth of structure, and comprehensiveness of scope.