Metrics for Evaluating the Semantic Implications of Changes in Evolving Ontologies

摘要

We propose a set of metrics for measuring the semantic implications of changes during ontology evolution. Our metrics focus on the changes of classes and associated axioms or annotations in an evolving OWL ontology. We identify three categories of changes and present class, class definition, class subsumption hierarchy, and logical model oriented metrics for quantifying these changes. We implement the proposed metrics using OWL API and Pellet OWL-DL reasoner. We evaluate our metrics by applying them to the evolution of the Gene Ontology.