Cross-lingual evaluation of ontologies with rudify

Abstract

Rudify is a set of tools used for automatically annotating concepts in an ontology with the ontological meta-properties employed by OntoClean [1]. While OntoClean provides a methodology for evaluating ontological hierarchies based on ontological meta-properties of the concepts in the hierarchy, it does not provide a method for determining the meta-properties of a given concept within an ontology. Rudify has been developed to help bridge this gap, and has been used in the KYOTO project to facilitate ontology development. The general idea behind Rudify is the assumption that a preferred set of linguistic expressions is used when talking about ontological meta-properties. Thus, one can deduce a concept's meta-properties from the usage of the concept's lexical representation (LR) in natural language. This paper describes the theory behind Rudify, the development of Rudify, and evaluates Rudify's output for the rigidity of base concepts in English, Dutch, and Spanish. Our overall conclusion is that the decisive output for English is useable data, while the procedure currently exploited by Rudify does not easily carry over to Spanish and Dutch. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.