Semantic metrics. (14th July 2008)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hu, Bo; Dasmahapatra, Srinandan; Lewis, Paul
• Is Part Of: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies. Volume 2:Number 4(2007)
• Page Start: 242
• Page End: 258
• Publication Date: 2008-07-14
• Subjects: interoperability -- semantic web -- ontology alignment -- semantic metrics -- formalisation -- ontology engineering; Metadata -- Periodicals; Semantic Web -- Periodicals; Ontologies (Information retrieval) -- Periodicals; Data structures (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 005.74
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2621

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.