Ontology usage analysis in the ontology lifecycle: A state-of-the-art review

The Semantic Web envisions a Web where information is accessible and processable by computers as well as humans. Ontologies are the cornerstones for realizing this vision of the Semantic Web by capturing domain knowledge through the defined terms and the relationship between them to provide a formal representation of the domain with machine-understandable semantics. Given the importance of ontologies, a significant amount of work in the literature has been done on knowledge representation on the Web which includes ontology development (ontology engineering), ontology evaluation, ontology population and ontology evolution. As a result, numerous domain ontologies have been developed however, not much attention has been given to the area of ontology usage analysis that shows how the developed ontologies are being used. Such a study is very important as we explain in this paper by using some motivational scenarios of a Semantic Web user in different roles. The discussion is followed by a summary of the state-of-the-art of the existing literature on ontology usage to highlight gaps in this area. We define Ontology Usage Analysis and discuss our proposed Ontology Usage Analysis Framework (OUSAF) to measure the usage of an ontology on the web from different perspectives. On a real-world collected dataset, the results obtained from OUSAF demonstrate the practical utilization of OUSAF in measuring ontology usage analysis. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.