Vivek Iyer received his MS Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). His research work was supervised by Dr. Raghu Reddy. Here’s a summary of his research work on Ontology Quality Evaluation:
The increasing popularity of semantic web has led to the creation and enrichment of ontologies and other linked datasets using automated algorithms. Alongside these algorithms, quality evaluation of the enriched ontologies is necessary to ensure reliability and reuse. Current quality evaluation approaches seek to evaluate ontologies in either syntactic (degree of following ontology development guidelines) or semantic (degree of semantic validity of enriched concepts/relations) aspects. Current syntactic quality evaluation approaches often use pre-defined rules and priorities for evaluation, which provide limited flexibility and customisability to the end user. Any extension to such works in an attempt to adapt it for a specific task or a different goal also requires significant programming, further posing hindrances in extensibility, especially for non-programming ontology engineers. to create or update rules at run time. Semantic approaches, on the other hand, which often involve crowdsourcing, suffer in output quality with increase in size and diversity of crowd validators. Most current approaches use naive majority voting, with some using spam-filtering techniques. While these methods are useful for eliminating spammers, the accuracy of these works are debatable in more general scenarios where only all validators have some degree of knowledge but only few are absolute experts regarding the ontology domain. In these scenarios, it would be useful to have an algorithm that grades validators according to their expertise and weights their decisions proportionally to their experience.
This work thus seeks to propose a semi-automated framework that seeks to achieve both syntactic and semantic quality evaluation in an integrated framework. The proposed framework consists of: a) SynEvaluator and b) SemValidator for evaluating the syntactic and semantic aspects of ontology quality respectively. SynEvaluator uses a novel theoretical rule-creation framework that aims to improve customisability and flexibility for the end user. It does so by allowing for dynamic, task-specific creation and updation of syntactic rules at runtime, all without any need for programming. SemValidator uses crowdsourcing for semantic validation. It also uses a novel algorithm, TweetExpert, to estimate the Twitter-based expertise of validators for weighing their decisions as a means of quality control. The efficacy and validity of the framework is shown empirically on multiple ontologies.