Domain ontology usage analysis framework

Abstract

The Semantic Web (also known as Web of Data) is growing fast and becoming a decentralized knowledge platform for publishing and sharing information. The web ontologies promote the establishment of a shared understanding between data providers and data consumers, allowing for automated information processing and effective and efficient information retrieval. The majority of existing research efforts is focused around ontology engineering, ontology evaluation and ontology evolution. This work goes a step further and evaluates theontology usage. In this paper, we present an Ontology Usage Analysis Framework (OUSAF) and a set of metrics used to measure the ontology usage. The implementation of the proposed framework is illustrated using the example of GoodRelations ontology (GRO). GRO has been well adopted by the semantic ecommerce community, and the OUSAF approach has been used to analyse GRO usage in the dataset comprised of RDF data collected from the web.