Identifying Ontology Design Styles with Metrics

This paper presents a metrics framework for identifying high-level ontology composition styles as an abstraction layer for ontology comprehension. The metrics are implemented on top of the OWL API metrics, which have been extended to capture various aspects of an on- tology. The metrics are applied to an ontology repository, and using clustering methods underlying design styles have been revealed. We seek to give a high-level view of how an ontology has been ``put together'' through the identification of authoring style using a range of ontology metrics. This `ontological style' can be considered as a metamodel, giving an intuition of what lies ``under the hood'' of an ontology. This can be useful in the broader area of ontology comprehension. The results high- lighted five design styles covered by the repository describing simple, as well as rich and complex ontologies.