Stable cohesion metrics for evolving ontologies

With the drastic development of semantic-driven applications, assessing the quality of ontologies has received more attention. Measuring and assessing the quality of ontologies can help ontology engineers to control project management and reduce the risk of project failures. However, most of the existing ontology metrics for measuring and assessing the quality of ontologies are defined based on ontology structure, and neglect the stability of ontology measurement. In this paper, we concentrate on stable ontology measurement by using semantically derived ontology metrics. We propose four ontology cohesion metrics, which fully consider the implicitly expressed semantic information and are defined based on ontological semantics rather than ontology structure. Before measuring and assessing an ontology, we materialize a pre-processing for stable ontology measurement by treating the ontology. The proposed ontology cohesion metrics are theoretically validated by the validation criteria of object-oriented software. The experimental results show that we can successfully collect more semantic knowledge from the testing ontologies for stable ontology measurement by using the proposed ontology cohesion metrics. The ontology cohesion metrics proposed in this paper can be reasonably used as a cogent complementarity of existing ontology metrics. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.