Representation and evaluation of hierarchical knowledge in formal ontologies

Ontological engineering methodologies have focused on the management of the whole ontology development process. However, there is a corresponding need to provide ideas and guidelines to represent and evaluate the knowledge, especially, the hierarchical knowledge. In this paper, we propose building principles of hierarchical knowledge, and identify different types of relations between categories (same relation, proper including relation, intersectional relation, compatible and parallel relation, disparate relation, contradicted relation, and opposite relation), and present an approach to evaluate the correctness of hierarchal knowledge based on different types of attributes of categories. We also address an application of this approach to building and evaluating the hierarchical knowledge of archaeological domain.