What is Monolithic Ontology

Ontology or domain specific vocabulary is indispensable to a semantic web-based application; therefore, its evaluation assumes critical importance for maintaining the quality. A modular ontology is intuitively preferred to as a monolithic ontology. A good quality modular ontology, in turn, promotes reusability. This chapter is directed at summarizing the efforts towards ontology evaluation, besides defining the process of evaluation, various approaches to evaluation and underlying motivation. In particular, a modular ontology's cohesion and coupling metrics have been discussed in detail as a case study. The authors believe that the body of knowledge in this chapter will serve as a beginning point for ontology quality engineers and at the same time acquaint them with the state-of-art in this field.