OntoSeer -- A Recommendation System to Improve the Quality of Ontologies

TL;DR

OntoSeer is a Protégé plugin that assists ontology developers, especially beginners, by providing real-time suggestions on naming, reuse, design patterns, and axioms to enhance ontology quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time recommendation tool, OntoSeer, that guides ontology development to improve quality and usability, addressing challenges faced by inexperienced developers.

Findings

Provides real-time suggestions during ontology development

Helps improve ontology quality and reusability

Assists in selecting appropriate design patterns and axioms

Abstract

Building an ontology is not only a time-consuming process, but it is also confusing, especially for beginners and the inexperienced. Although ontology developers can take the help of domain experts in building an ontology, they are not readily available in several cases for a variety of reasons. Ontology developers have to grapple with several questions related to the choice of classes, properties, and the axioms that should be included. Apart from this, there are aspects such as modularity and reusability that should be taken care of. From among the thousands of publicly available ontologies and vocabularies in repositories such as Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) and BioPortal, it is hard to know the terms (classes and properties) that can be reused in the development of an ontology. A similar problem exists in implementing the right set of ontology design patterns (ODPs) from among the several available. Generally, ontology developers make use of their experience in handling these issues, and the inexperienced ones have a hard time. In order to bridge this gap, we propose a tool named OntoSeer, that monitors the ontology development process and provides suggestions in real-time to improve the quality of the ontology under development. It can provide suggestions on the naming conventions to follow, vocabulary to reuse, ODPs to implement, and axioms to be added to the ontology. OntoSeer has been implemented as a Prot\'eg\'e plug-in.