Abstract:
Biomedical ontologies are being developed in a large amount since the last decade. Recently, due to abrupt expansion in biological data and knowledge in the form of biomedical ontologies, the attention of their usefulness increases in the research activities. Meanwhile, there exist some challenges of accurately building and maintaining ontologies so that their benefits of reusability in the respective knowledge fields and applications can be exercised. Further on due to the complex structure of ontologies and difficult terminologies of biomedical domain, the evaluation of these ontologies turns out to be a challenging task. It is utmost need of current ontology researchers and developers to evaluate the quality of these biomedical ontologies so that the applicability and reuse of these ontologies will be improved. In motivation of this need we have proposed a methodology of evaluating the quality of biomedical ontologies with respect to basic ontology structural building blocks like concepts, classes including subclasses, super-classes, instances/individuals of the classes, triple components including subjects, predicates and objects, properties including object properties, data properties, annotation properties, functional properties, symmetric properties, asymmetric properties and reflexive properties. When domain knowledge is combined with these mentioned above structural components, it gives rise to a well structured and elaborative ontology. The experimental results explain obvious variations of structural components the candidate biomedical ontologies of same domain.
