Title: Semantic metrics

Authors: Bo Hu, Srinandan Dasmahapatra, Paul Lewis

Addresses: Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. ' Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. ' Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

Abstract: In the context of the Semantic Web, many ontology-related operations, e.g., ontology ranking, segmentation, alignment, articulation, reuse, evaluation, etc., can be boiled down to one fundamental operation: computing the similarity and/or dissimilarity among ontological entities, and in some cases among ontologies. In this paper, we review conventional metrics for computing distance and we propose a series of metrics conceived purposely for semantics rich entities. We give a formal account of semantic metrics drawn from a variety of research disciplines and enrich them with formalisation based on Description Logics. We argue that concept-based metrics can be aggregated to produce numeric distances at ontology-level. We speculate on the usability of our ideas in potential ontology engineering tasks.

Keywords: interoperability; semantic web; ontology alignment; semantic metrics; formalisation; ontology engineering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2007.019443

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2007 Vol.2 No.4, pp.242 - 258

Published online: 11 Jul 2008 *

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