Analysing ontological structures through name pattern tracking

Abstract

Concept naming over the taxonomic structure is a useful indicator of the quality of design as well as source of information exploitable for various tasks such as ontology refactoring and mapping. We analysed collections of OWL ontologies with the aim of determining the frequency of several combined name&graph patterns potentially indicating underlying semantic structures. Such structures range from simple set-theoretic subsumption to more complex constructions such as parallel taxonomies of different entity types. The final goal is to help refactor legacy ontologies as well as to ease automatic alignment among different models. The results show that in most ontologies there is a significant number of occurrences of such patterns. Moreover, their detection even using very simple methods has precision sufficient for a semi-automated analysis scenario. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.