The Current Landscape of Pitfalls in Ontologies

Abstract

A growing number of ontologies are already available thanks to development initiatives in many different
fields. In such ontology developments, developers must tackle a wide range of difficulties and handicaps,
which can result in the appearance of anomalies in the resulting ontologies. Therefore, ontology evaluation
plays a key role in ontology development projects. OOPS! is an on-line tool that automatically detects pitfalls,
considered as potential errors or problems, and thus may help ontology developers to improve their ontologies.
To gain insight in the existence of pitfalls and to assess whether there are differences among ontologies
developed by novices, a random set of already scanned ontologies, and existing well-known ones, data of 406
OWL ontologies were analysed on OOPS!’s 21 pitfalls, of which 24 ontologies were also examined manually
on the detected pitfalls. The various analyses performed show only minor differences between the three sets
of ontologies, therewith providing a general landscape of pitfalls in ontologies.