A Comparative Application of Multi-criteria Decision Making in Ontology Ranking

Abstract

The number of available ontologies on the web has increased tremendously in recent years. The choice of suitable ontologies for reuse is a decision-making problem. However, there has been little use of decision-making on ontologies to date. This study applies three Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) algorithms in ontology ranking. A number of ontologies/alternatives and the complexity metrics or attributes of these ontologies are used in the decision. The experiments are carried out with 70 ontologies and the performance of the algorithms are analysed and compared. The results show that all the algorithms have successfully ranked the input ontologies based on their degree/level of complexity. Furthermore, the results portray a strong correlation between the ranking results of the three MCDM algorithms, thereby, providing more insights on the performance of MCDM algorithms in ontology ranking.