A Framework for Evaluation of OWL Biomedical Ontologies Based on Properties Coverage

Abstract

Biomedical ontologies are being developed in a great quantity since the last decade. Due to the complex structure of ontologies and difficult terminologies of biomedical domain, the evaluation of these ontologies turns out to be a challenging task. It is utmost need of current ontology researchers and developers to evaluate the quality of these biomedical ontologies so that the applicability and reuse of these ontologies will be improved. In motivation of this need we have proposed a methodology of evaluating the quality of biomedical ontologies with respect to basic ontology structural building blocks especially with respect to properties or relations including object properties, data properties, annotation properties, inverse properties, functional properties, symmetric properties, asymmetric properties and reflexive properties. SPARQL queries are used to extract their population frequency. Experimentation provide evidences that these structural properties/relations between the concepts are of core significance in ontology evaluation.