Automatic Evaluation of Ontologies (AEON)

Abstract

OntoClean is a unique approach towards the formal evaluation of ontologies, as it analyses the intensional content of concepts. Although it is well documented in numerous publications, and its importance is widely acknowledged, it is still used rather infrequently due to the high costs for applying OntoClean, especially on tagging concepts with the correct meta-properties. In order to facilitate the use of Onto-Clean and to enable proper evaluation of it in real-world cases, we provide AEON, a tool which automatically tags concepts with appropriate Onto-Clean meta-properties. The implementation can be easily expanded to check the concepts for other abstract meta-properties, thus providing for the first time tool support in order to enable intensional ontology evaluation for concepts. Our main idea is using the web as an embodiment of objective world knowledge, where we search for patterns indicating concepts meta-properties. We get an automatic tagging of the ontology, thus reducing costs tremendously. Moreover, AEON lowers the risk of having subjective taggings. As part of the evaluation we report our experiences from creating a middle-sized OntoClean-tagged reference ontology. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.