Ranking E-government Ontologies on the Semantic Web

The field of e-government has been an attractive area of ontology development in the past years, resulting in an increase in the number of e-government ontologies on the web. The availability of these ontologies gives the opportunity to reuse them in future e-government projects rather than trying to develop similar ontologies de novo. This study aims to promote the selection and reuse of e-government ontologies on the web, through the provision of a ranked list of existing e-government ontologies on the basis of their quality metrics. A number of 23 e-government ontologies are downloaded on the web and their quality metrics are computed with the OntoMetrics online ontology evaluation environment. Thereafter, a decision making algorithm is applied to rank the e-government ontologies based on the aggregation of their quality metrics. The decision scheme is constituted of the 23 e-government ontologies or alternatives and their 11 quality metrics or attributes. The experimental results yielded an ordered list of the 23 inputs e-government ontologies ranked according to their quality metrics. This may provide some insights on the selection and reuse of these ontologies in future e-government projects.