The following evaluation results have been generated by the RESTFul web service provided by OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!). OOPS! is a software on development, and we will be happy to receive your feedbak. If you notice any issue in the evaluation, please contact us at oops@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es.
It is obvious that not all the pitfalls are equally important; their impact in the ontology will depend on multiple factors. For this reason, each pitfall has an importance level attached indicating how important it is. We have identified three levels:
Ontology elements (classes, object properties and datatype properties) are created isolated, with no relation to the rest of the ontology.
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
This pitfall consists in creating an ontology element and failing to provide human readable annotations attached to it. Consequently, ontology elements lack annotation properties that label them (e.g. rdfs:label, lemon:LexicalEntry, skos:prefLabel or skos:altLabel) or that define them (e.g. rdfs:comment or dc:description). This pitfall is related to the guidelines provided in [5].
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
Object and/or datatype properties without domain or range (or none of them) are included in the ontology.
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
This pitfall appears when any relationship (except for those that are defined as symmetric properties using owl:SymmetricProperty) does not have an inverse relationship (owl:inverseOf) defined within the ontology.
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
The ontology elements are not named following the same convention (for example CamelCase or use of delimiters as "-" or "_") . Some notions about naming conventions are provided in [2].
*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements
An ontology element (a class, an object property or a datatype property) is used in its own definition. Some examples of this would be: (a) the definition of a class as the enumeration of several classes including itself; (b) the appearance of a class within its owl:equivalentClass or rdfs:subClassOf axioms; (c) the appearance of an object property in its rdfs:domain or range rdfs:range definitions; or (d) the appearance of a datatype property in its rdfs:domain definition.
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
This pitfall consists in missing the definition of equivalent classes (owl:equivalentClass) in case of duplicated concepts. When an ontology reuses terms from other ontologies, classes that have the same meaning should be defined as equivalent in order to benefit the interoperability between both ontologies.
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
It refers to reusing or referring to terms from another namespace that are not defined in such namespace. This is an undesirable situation as no information can be retrieved when looking up those undefined terms. This pitfall is related to the Linked Data publishing guidelines provided in [11]: "Only define new terms in a namespace that you control" and to the guidelines provided in [5].
This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:
References: