Maintaining the Quality of Evolving Ontologies in the Agriculture Domain: Challenges and a Specialised Evaluation Tool

The development of well-engineered quality ontologies is crucial to ensure capabilities of ontologies such as enhanced communication, knowledge reuse, and knowledge analytical capabilities. Ontology engineers conduct comprehensive evaluations to ensure ontology quality by utilising multiple tools and approaches. However, the ontology evaluators encountered challenges in choosing appropriate evaluation tools and approaches, especially in the context of a decision support system where knowledge accuracy, completeness and relevancy are highly required. This study discusses the challenges encountered when assessing ontology quality, primarily considering the agriculture domain and highlights anomalies in the existing evaluation tools. Consequently, the study developed a tool which addresses the identified limitations in the existing tools. This tool includes measures for assessing crucial quality characteristics related to agriculture ontologies, such as complexity, completeness, consistency, modularity, and comprehensibility. Further, it supports developers in gaining valuable insights to mitigate the issues associated with these key quality characteristics of ontologies.