Quality of subsumption hierarchies in ontologies

Ontologies are becoming increasingly more popular tools for many tasks, such as information integration, information retrieval, knowledge management and extraction etc. The cost and complexity of developing good ontologies is high, and therefore it is important to be able to verify the ontology and detect flaws early. In this paper we propose an approach to expose desirable properties of ontological structures. The approach is based on an ontological profile which is an ontology extended with a vector of weighted terms describing the semantics of each concept of the ontology. We describe four hypotheses for the relations among the classes of the ontology and perform experiments to verify them. Our initial findings are that the experiments support the hypotheses.