Abstract
With the tremendous development in size, the complexity of ontology increases. Thus ontology evaluation becomes extremely important for developers to determine the fundamental characteristics of ontologies in order to improve the quality, estimate cost and reduce future maintenance. Our research examines the concepts and their hierarchy in ontology conceptual model, the common feature of most ontologies, which reflects the fundamental complexity. We suggest some well-defined metrics of complexity, which mainly examine the quantity, ratio and correlativity of concepts and relationships, to evaluate ontology from the viewpoint of complexity and evolution. In the study, we measured three ontologies in Gene Ontology to verify our metrics. The results indicate that these metrics works well, and the biological process ontology is the most complex one from the view of complexity, and the molecular function ontology is the unsteadiest one from the view of evolution.
Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 90204010.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Nejdl, W., Wolf, B., Qu, C., Decker, S., Sintek, M., Naeve, A., Nilsson, M., Palmr, M., Risch, T.: Edutella: a p2p networking infrastructure based on rdf. In: Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 604–615. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The semantic web. Scientific American 284(5), 34–43 (2001)
Das, A., Wu, W., McGuinness, D.: Industrial Strength Ontology Management, The Emerging Semantic Web. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2002)
Sirin, E., Hendler, J., Parsia, B.: Semiautomatic composition of web services using semantic description. Web Services: Modeling. In: Architecture and Infrastructure Workshop in Conjunction with ICEIS 2003 (2003)
Stojanovic, L., Motik, B.: Ontology Evolution within Ontology. In: Gómez-Pérez, A., Benjamins, V.R. (eds.) EKAW 2002. LNCS, vol. 2473. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Staab, S., Schnurr, H.-P., Studer, R., Sure, Y.: Knowledge Processes and Ontologies. IEEE Intelligent Systems 16(1) (January/February 2001) (Special Issue on Knowledge Management 2001)
Wand, Y., Weber, R.: Research Commentary: Information Systems and Conceptual Modeling - A Research Agenda. Information Systems Research 13(4), 363–376 (2002)
Corcho, O., Gomez-Perez, A.: A road map to ontology specification languages. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management, Juan-les-Pins, France, pp. 80–96 (2000)
Burton-Jones, A., Storey, V.C., Sugumaran, V., Ahluwalia, P.: Assessing the effectiveness of the daml ontologies for the semantic web. In: Eighth International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (June 2003)
Yao, H., Orme, A.M., Etzkorn, L.: Cohesion Metrics for Ontology Design and Application. Journal of Computer Science 1(1), 107–113 (2005)
Kang, D., Xu, B., Lu, J., Chu, W.C.: A Complexity Measure for Ontology Based on UML. In: 10th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (FTDCS 2004), pp. 222–228 (2004)
Hsi, I.: Analyzing the Conceptual Coherence of Computing Applications Through Ontological Excavation., PhD Thesis Proposal (May 13, 2004)
Mungall, C.: Increased complexity in the GO, http://www.fruitfly.org/~cjm/obol/doc/go-complexity.html
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Yang, Z., Zhang, D., Ye, C. (2006). Ontology Analysis on Complexity and Evolution Based on Conceptual Model. In: Leser, U., Naumann, F., Eckman, B. (eds) Data Integration in the Life Sciences. DILS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4075. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11799511_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11799511_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-36593-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36595-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)