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OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!) helps you to detect some of the most common pitfalls appearing when developing ontologies.

To try it, enter a URI or paste an OWL document into the text field above. A list of pitfalls and the elements of your ontology where they appear will be displayed.

Scanner by URI:

Example: http://oops.linkeddata.es/example/swc_2009-05-09.rdf


Scanner by direct input:

Uncheck this checkbox if you don't want us to keep a copy of your ontology.

Evaluation results

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:

  • Critical Critical : It is crucial to correct the pitfall. Otherwise, it could affect the ontology consistency, reasoning, applicability, etc.
  • Important Important : Though not critical for ontology function, it is important to correct this type of pitfall.
  • Minor Minor : It is not really a problem, but by correcting it we will make the ontology nicer.

Results for P08: Missing annotations. 3 cases | Minor Minor

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].

• The following elements have no rdfs:label defined:
› http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#Event
› http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group
› http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#Concept

Results for P10: Missing disjointness. ontology* | Important Important

The ontology lacks disjoint axioms between classes or between properties that should be defined as disjoint. This pitfall is related with the guidelines provided in [6], [2] and [7].

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements.

Results for P11: Missing domain or range in properties. 5 cases | Important Important

Object and/or datatype properties without domain or range (or none of them) are included in the ontology.

• This pitfall appears in the following elements:
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#projectedPublication
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publication
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publicationStart
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publicationEnd
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#bnb

• Tip: Solving this pitfall may lead to new results for other pitfalls and suggestions. We encourage you to solve all cases when needed and see what else you can get from OOPS!

Results for P13: Inverse relationships not explicitly declared. 4 cases | Minor Minor

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 appears in the following elements:
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publicationEnd
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publicationStart
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#publication
› http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#projectedPublication

Results for P34: Untyped class. 4 cases | Important Important

An ontology element is used as a class without having been explicitly declared as such using the primitives owl:Class or rdfs:Class. This pitfall is related with the common problems listed in [8].

• This pitfall appears in the following elements:
› http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#Event
› http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#Concept
› http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group
› http://purl.org/vocommons/voaf#Vocabulary

Results for P35: Untyped property. 3 cases | Important Important

An ontology element is used as a property without having been explicitly declared as such using the primitives rdf:Property, owl:ObjectProperty or owl:DatatypeProperty. This pitfall is related with the common problems listed in [8].

• This pitfall appears in the following elements:
› http://purl.org/dc/terms/identifier
› http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator
› http://purl.org/dc/terms/contributor

Results for P38: No OWL ontology declaration. ontology* | Important Important

This pitfall consists in not declaring the owl:Ontology tag, which provides the ontology metadata. The owl:Ontology tag aims at gathering metadata about a given ontology such as version information, license, provenance, creation date, and so on. It is also used to declare the inclusion of other ontologies.

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements.

Results for P39: Ambiguous namespace. ontology* | Critical Critical

This pitfall consists in declaring neither the ontology URI nor the xml:base namespace. If this is the case, the ontology namespace is matched to the file location. This situation is not desirable, as the location of a file might change while the ontology should remain stable, as proposed in [12].

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements.

Results for P40: Namespace hijacking. 1 case | Critical Critical

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 appears in the following elements:
› http://creativecommons.org/ns#license

• For detecting this pitfall we rely on TripleChecker. See more results at TripleChecker website. Up to now this pitfall is only available for the "Scanner by URI" option.


According to the highest importance level of pitfall found in your ontology the conformace bagde suggested is "Critical pitfalls" (see below). You can use the following HTML code to insert the badge within your ontology documentation:


Critical pitfalls were found 
<p>
<a href="http://oops.linkeddata.es"><img
	src="http://oops.linkeddata.es/resource/image/oops_critical.png"
	alt="Critical pitfalls were found" height="69.6" width="100" /></a>
</p>


References:

  • [1] Aguado-De Cea, G., Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Poveda-Villalón, M., and Giraldo-Pasmin, O.X. (2015). Lexicalizing Ontologies: The issues behind the labels. In Multimodal communication in the 21st century: Professional and academic challenges. 33rd Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA), XXXIII AESLA.
  • [2] Noy, N. F., McGuinness, D. L., et al. (2001). Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology.
  • [3] Gómez-Pérez, A. (1999). Evaluation of Taxonomic Knowledge in Ontologies and Knowledge Bases. Proceedings of the Banff Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop. Alberta, Canada.
  • [4] Montiel-Ponsoda, E., Vila Suero, D., Villazón-Terrazas, B., Dunsire, G., Escolano Rodríguez, E., Gómez-Pérez, A. (2011). Style guidelines for naming and labeling ontologies in the multilingual web.
  • [5] Vrandecic, D. (2010). Ontology Evaluation. PhD thesis.
  • [6] Gómez-Pérez, A. (2004). Ontology evaluation. In Handbook on ontologies, pages 251-273. Springer.
  • [7] Rector, A., Drummond, N., Horridge, M., Rogers, J., Knublauch, H., Stevens, R., Wang, H., and Wroe, C. (2004). Owl pizzas: Practical experience of teaching owl-dl: Common errors & common patterns. In Engineering Knowledge in the Age of the Semantic Web, pages 63-81. Springer.
  • [8] Hogan, A., Harth, A., Passant, A., Decker, S., and Polleres, A. (2010). Weaving the pedantic web. In Proceedings of the WWW2010 Workshop on Linked Data on the Web, LDOW 2010, Raleigh, USA, April 27, 2010.
  • [9] Archer, P., Goedertier, S., and Loutas, N. (2012). D7. 1.3-study on persistent URIs, with identification of best practices and recommendations on the topic for the Mss and the EC. PwC EU Services.
  • [10] Bernes-Lee Tim. (2006). “Linked Data - Design issues”. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
  • [11] Heath, T. and Bizer, C. (2011). Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Morgan & Claypool, 1st edition.
  • [12] Vatant, B. (2012). Is your linked data vocabulary 5-star?. http://bvatant.blogspot.fr/2012/02/is-your-linked-data-vocabulary-5-star_9588.html

How to cite OOPS!

Poveda-Villalón, María, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, and Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa. "OOPS!(Ontology Pitfall Scanner!): An on-line tool for ontology evaluation." International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) 10.2 (2014): 7-34.


BibTex:


@article{poveda2014oops,
 title={{OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!): An On-line Tool for Ontology Evaluation}},
 author={Poveda-Villal{\'o}n, Mar{\'i}a and G{\'o}mez-P{\'e}rez, Asunci{\'o}n and Su{\'a}rez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen},
 journal={International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS)},
 volume={10},
 number={2},
 pages={7--34},
 year={2014},
 publisher={IGI Global}
}

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