A framework for measuring ontology usage on the web

Abstract

A decade-long conscious effort by the Semantic Web community has resulted in the formation of a decentralized knowledge platform which enables data interoperability at a syntactic and semantic level. For information interoperability, at a syntactic level, RDF provides the standard format for publishing data and RDFS gives structure to the information. For semantic-level interoperability, ontologies are used which allow information dissemination and assimilation among diverse applications and systems; where information is equally accessible and useful to humans and machines. The success of the linked open data project, recognition of explicit semantics (annotated through web ontologies) by search engines and the realized potential advantages of semantic data for publishers have resulted in tremendous growth in the use of web ontologies on the web. In order to promote the adoption of ontologies (to new users), reusability of adopted ontologies, effective and efficient utilization on ontological knowledge and evolving the ontological model, erudite insight on the usage of ontologies is imperative. While ontology evaluation attempts to evaluate a developed ontology to assess its fitness and quality, it does not provide any insight into how ontologies are being used and what is the state of prevalent knowledge patterns. Realizing the importance of measuring and analysing ontology usage to advance the adoption, reusability and exploitation of ontologies, we present a semantic framework for measuring and analysing ontology usage on the Web on empirical grounding.Our methodological approach is discussed to highlight the detail and role of each step. A framework is presented along with the set of metrics developed to measure ontology usage from different aspects such as ontology richness, usage and incentives to provide a holistic view on the state of ontology usage. The framework is then evaluated using an important use-case scenario to identify the prevalent knowledge patterns in order to rank the terminological knowledge for annotating the information.