One obstacle that hinders the realization of the Semantic Web is high hurdle placed on metadata designing. Although metadata design difficulty is acknowledged by many, few researches have analyzed design difficulties in detail. As demand for metadata increases, support for easy designing of metadata is needed. To support metadata designing, we first clarify three metadata design difficulties: 1) difficulties relating to class and property uncertainty, 2) subsumption relation uncertainty, and 3) uncertainty in comprehensive metadata coverage. A design support tool, which retrieves, organizes, and displays relevant metadata defined in existing ontologies is proposed. The tool generates design materials that address the metadata design difficulties stated above, by providing the human designer with information about 1) which class or property definition is the majority definition, 2) what subsumption relation is defined, and 3) what similar properties are defined in multiple ontologies.
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