A Lattice Metric for Evaluating Ontology Hierarchies

Similarity metrics are used for ontology matchmaking, clustering, comparisons and evolutions evaluation in Semantic Web enabled applications. In this paper, we put forward a novel lattice based ontology similarity metric and its corresponding assessment algorithm for comparing different ontology hierarchies. The proposed lattice-based metric has unique advantages as it provides a unified method which takes into account not only concept nodes but also the hierarchy relationships between concepts in the ontology; it has been validated by experiment on spatiotemporal ontologies and some other domain ontologies, which shows the potential applicability of the proposed method.