FOCA: A Methodology for Ontology Evaluation
  Modeling an ontology is a hard and time-consuming task. Although
methodologies are useful for ontologists to create good ontologies, they do not
help with the task of evaluating the quality of the ontology to be reused. For
these reasons, it is imperative to evaluate the quality of the ontology after
constructing it or before reusing it. Few studies usually present only a set of
criteria and questions, but no guidelines to evaluate the ontology. The effort
to evaluate an ontology is very high as there is a huge dependence on the
evaluator's expertise to understand the criteria and questions in depth.
Moreover, the evaluation is still very subjective. This study presents a novel
methodology for ontology evaluation, taking into account three fundamental
principles: i) it is based on the Goal, Question, Metric approach for empirical
evaluation; ii) the goals of the methodologies are based on the roles of
knowledge representations combined with specific evaluation criteria; iii) each
ontology is evaluated according to the type of ontology. The methodology was
empirically evaluated using different ontologists and ontologies of the same
domain. The main contributions of this study are: i) defining a step-by-step
approach to evaluate the quality of an ontology; ii) proposing an evaluation
based on the roles of knowledge representations; iii) the explicit difference
of the evaluation according to the type of the ontology iii) a questionnaire to
evaluate the ontologies; iv) a statistical model that automatically calculates
the quality of the ontologies.
