Criteria and Evaluation for Ontology Modularization Techniques

While many authors have argued for the benefits of applying principles of modularization to ontologies, there is not yet a common understanding of how modules are defined and what properties they should have. In the previous section, this question was addressed from a purely logical point of view. In this chapter, we take a broader view on possible criteria that can be used to determine the quality of a modules. Such criteria include logic-based, but also structural and application-dependent criteria, sometimes borrowing from related fields such as software engineering. We give an overview of possible criteria and identify a lack of application-dependent quality measures. We further report some modularization experiments and discuss the role of quality criteria and evaluation in the context of these experiments.