Data-Driven Ontology Evaluation Based on Competency Questions: a Study in the Agricultural Domain

Abstract

Climate changes and water shortages are real concerns that affect various spheres of our society. Brazil, for example, lived in 2015 one of its major water crisis, as water availability in the country is directly related to climate. Thus, research is needed in various fields of knowledge in order to understand climate changes and its impacts on water resources. The Knowledge Organization's contribution can relate to the modeling of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), which are systematic tools aimed at building abstract models of the real world through the representation of domain concepts. These instruments make it possible, among other things, a shared view on a specific area, and facilitate communication between people with different views through common vocabulary. A KOS that has gained prominence in the Knowledge Organization field is ontology. An ontology can be defined as a shared model of reality, which is formally represented by classes, properties, relationships and axioms. Although ontologies have potential in knowledge representation, they must be tested for the guaranty of quality. The ontology evaluation is one way to ensure the quality of an ontology. Since the purpose of ontology evaluation is to verify the conformity of world model to the world modeled formally.

The guiding objective of this research is to evaluate a domain ontology using a data- driven ontology evaluation. The ontology intends to evaluate in this work was

developed by specialists from Embrapa Campinas, and it is named OntoAgroHidro.