Abstract
The quality of an ontology very much depends on its validity. Therefore, ontology validation and evaluation is very important task. However, according to the current literature, there is no agreed method or approach to evaluate an ontology. The choice of a suitable approach very much depends on the purpose of validation or evaluation, the application in which the ontology is to be used, and on what aspect of the ontology we are trying to validate or evaluate. We have developed large user centered ontology to represent agricultural information and relevant knowledge in user context for Sri Lankan farmers. In this paper, we described the validation and evaluation procedures we applied to verify the content and examine the applicability of the developed ontology. We obtained expert suggestions and assessments for the criteria used to develop the ontology as well as to obtain user feedback especially from the farmers to measure the ontological commitment. Delphi Method, Modified Delphi Method and OOPS! Web-based tool were used to validate the ontology in terms of accuracy and quality. The implemented ontology is evaluated internally and externally to identify the deficiencies of the artifact in use. An online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge. It was also made use of for the evaluation process. A mobile-based application is developed to check user satisfaction on the knowledge provided by the ontology. Since there is no single best or preferred method for ontology evaluation we reviewed various approaches used to evaluate the ontology and finally identified classification for ontology evaluation approaches based on our work.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the financial assistance provided to carry out this research work by the HRD Program of the HETC project of the Ministry of Higher Education, Sri Lanka and the valuable assistance from other researchers working on the Social Life Network project. Assistance from the National Science Foundation to carry out the field visits is also acknowledged. Further, we would like to give our heartiest thanks to all the farmers and Agricultural Instructors (AIs) who took part in the evaluation process for their valuable insights and time. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the LK Domain Registry for funding to publish this work.
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Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., Wikramanayake, G.N. (2016). Ontology Evaluation Approaches: A Case Study from Agriculture Domain. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2016. ICCSA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42089-9_23
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