Evaluation of ontology enhancement tools

Mining algorithms can enhance the task of ontology establishment but methods are needed to assess the quality of their findings. Ontology establishment is a long-term interactive process, so it is important to evaluate the contribution of a mining tool at an early phase of this process so that only appropriate tools are used in later phases. We propose a method for the evaluation of such tools on their impact on ontology enhancement. We model impact as quality perceived by the expert and as statistical quality computed by an objective function. We further provide a mechanism that juxtaposes the two forms of quality. We have applied our method on an ontology enhancement tool and gained some interesting insights on the interplay between perceived impact and statistical quality. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.