Analyzing the Evolution of Ontology Versioning Using Metrics

The large-scale ontologies are more and more widely used in various fields, some ontologies even have evolved through a number of versions. There is an increasing need for finding a set of metrics to analyze ontology systematically. In this paper, inspired by the concept of ontology metrics at the ontology-level and the class-level, we expand ontology metrics to the property-level and choose well-known large-scale ontologies OpenGALEN and OpenCyc that have different versions as our datasets, then we develop a tool to calculate 12 ontology metrics. Finally, we analyze the experimental results to exhibit the usefulness of ontology metrics and point out some important characteristics of ontology evolution in different ontologies.