Quality Evaluation of Semantic Web Applications

Abstract

As discussed in Chap. 1, Semantic Web applications are radically changing the software industry through their ability to share and use data from heterogeneous sources. This in turn enables the discovery of meaningful relationships among chunks of data. Having understood the significance of such applications in giving insights into knowledge toward solving real-world problems, one must measure and improve their quality. This chapter carries forward the idea of assessing ontologies from Chap. 2 and underlines the need for assessing in totality, a Semantic Web application supported by ontology. This may benefit customer by providing his/her the quality ranking of different Semantic Web applications which provide similar functionality. Moreover, the developer may use the qualitative assessment result toward monitoring and improvising his Semantic Web application. As per our knowledge, there exists no framework which allows customers to rank Semantic Web applications based on their quality. It is expected of such framework to preserve the quality attributes of Semantic Web-based applications, which overlap with conventional software or Web applications and in addition incorporate specific quality attributes of Semantic Web-based applications. This chapter presents in detail a Semantic Web application quality evaluation framework (referred to as SWAQ) which employs Analytic Hierarchy Process for Multiple Criteria Decision-Making and Fuzzy Inference System for finding the quality. The implementation of SWAQ has been described using a case study, and comparative study of results has been done. Moreover, SWAQ’s foundations have been validated with the help of standard benchmarks of IEEE 1061 and Kitchenham.