Evaluating Scientific Domain Ontologies for the Electromagnetic Knowledge Domain: A General Methodology

The adoption of ontologies as a formalized approach to information codification is a constant-growing phenomenon in scientific research. Moreover, knowledge sharing and reuse can be improved by adopting hierarchical and modular frameworks and therein embedding available ontologies. Unfortunately, mergingprocedures may bring about severe, time-consuming problems if a careful selection process is not carried out. Based on these considerations, we propose a methodology for evaluating and selecting higher-levelontologies, given the lower-level ones. Our proposal is based on the computation of ad-hoc metrics which take into account structural and semantic aspects and on the adoption of a multi-decisional analysis procedure. The methodology has been applied to identify ontologies suitable for providing a scientificdomain high-level codification to Electromagnetism. Two well-known scientific domain ontologies have been selected and evaluated with the proposed methodology.