Herb ontology : maturity-based analysis of lightweight ontology on herb usages

Abstract

Ontology serves as a basis for denominating objects in a certain domain. A lightweight ontology is built using classes, instances and relationships and does not include any axiomatic definitions such as the ones found in heavyweight ontology.However, the lightweight ontology needs to be matured in order to detail the concepts and relationship that occur in a domain. To date, there is no suitable ontology design that exists in the herb domain and a design that is measured due to the heterogeneity of the ontology structures. In this study, a lightweight ontology specializing in herbal domain known as Herb Ontology (HO) is developed to explore the complete use of herbs based on their profiles. It began with the design of an informal domain modelling followed by an informal HO design that would manipulate the Unified Modelling Language (UML) notations to highlight the functionality, services and procedural strategies. In conjunction with that, eleven ontology metrics covering three maturity principles namely: reuse, extend and evolve are presented in this study. The principles are measured in both class-level and ontology-level so that different aspects of the ontology designs can be evaluated and would aid in controlling the development process of HO. Besides that, the HO design was compared with other types of ontology such as COIN, Gene Ontology and OntoCAPE. It was found that HO has Inheritance Richness = 0.99301 with the potential to be reused and a denser network ontology (Edge Node Ratio = 1.84) indicating the possibility of HO being extended and evolved. The results have proven that this proposed HO design has compiled herb usage for use by conventional and modern herbalists.