Title: Towards measurement of structural complexity for ontologies

Authors: Niyati Baliyan; Sandeep Kumar

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Abstract: Ontologies represent knowledge of a particular domain and form an elementary unit for inference techniques on the semantic web. It is important to measure the complexity of ontologies in order for users to better understand, maintain, reuse and integrate them. Existing measures for the complexity of an ontology either handle complexity at schema and instance levels or define subjective parameters to measure ontology complexity. To this end, we present a semi-automated framework to measure the structural complexity at different abstraction levels of an ontology. Moreover, our metrics leverage the information provided by ontology editors, which can be useful to the ontology designer for selection of the ontology with optimum complexity among alternative ontologies. Our framework is inspired by the concept of component-based software complexity metrics and its metrics have been validated against Briand's and Weyuker's benchmarks. We have also performed comparative analysis on public ontologies.

Keywords: structural complexity; ontologies; metrics; ontology complexity; ranking; Swoogle; Briand's framework; semantic web; measurement; Weyuker's properties; Spearman's coefficient.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2016.077343

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2016 Vol.11 No.2, pp.153 - 173

Published online: 28 Jun 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article