A complexity measure for ontology based on UML

UML is a good tool to represent ontologies. When using UML for ontology development, one of the principal goals is to assure the quality of ontologies. UML class diagrams provide a static modeling capability that is well suited for representing ontologies, so the structural complexity of a UML class diagram is one of the most important measures to evaluate the quality of the ontologies. This paper uses weighted class dependence graphs to represent given class diagrams, and then presents a structure complexity measure for the UML class diagrams based on entropy distance. It considers complexity of both classes and relationships between the classes, and presents rules for transforming complexity value of classes and different kinds of relations into weighted class dependence graphs. This method can measure the structure complexity of class diagrams objectively.

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