Towards a usable ontology: the identification of quality characteristics for an ontology-driven decision support system

Achieving quality in use (i.e., the higher-level quality objectives) is now widely accepted for building a usable system and software product. However, ontology engineering is a discipline for which the quality theories are not yet well developed and adapted and thus, ontology engineering still does not have an agreed methodology and standards for ontology evaluation. As a result, an ontology-driven system may consist of a badly engineered ontology that is not usable. This will in turn cause an adverse effect on the quality in use of the corresponding system. It is necessary to alleviate this problem by formulating an evaluation methodology and standards towards producing a usable ontology particularly targeting an ontology-driven system. It is evident through the literature as well as our practical experience through an agricultural ontology-driven Decision Support System (DSS) that quality in use of the system is tightly coupled with the quality of the ontology. As the first step towards this, we explored the well-established quality theories in system and software engineering to adapt and enhance the quality concepts defined so far in the ontology engineering domain. In the light of this study, we devised an ontology quality approach that guides developers to produce ontologies by avoiding quality issues to make ontology-driven DSSs usable. The proposed approach was exemplified using a use case from the agriculture domain. This research could be a foundation to inspire and assist ontology engineers to rethink about ontology quality from a broader view in developing a usable ontology.