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OntoSniff

Detect ontology anti-patterns and quality issues automatically. Paste or upload your TTL, and OntoSniff will analyze it against a catalog of known smells.


Anti-Pattern Catalog

OntoSniff checks for these documented ontology anti-patterns:

# Smell Severity What it detects Reference
1 Lazy Class Warning Class with no instances and no subclasses Poveda-Villalón (2014), P11
2 Missing Label Warning Entity without rdfs:label Poveda-Villalón (2014), P08
3 Missing Domain/Range Info Property without rdfs:domain or rdfs:range Rector et al. (2004)
4 Singleton Hierarchy Info Chain of single-child subClassOf Gangemi et al. (2006)
5 Property Soup Warning Class with >15 direct properties Modularization pattern
6 Orphan Class Info Class disconnected from hierarchy Poveda-Villalón (2014), P04
7 Missing Inverse Info Object property without owl:inverseOf Bidirectional navigation
8 No SHACL Coverage Warning Instances without validation shapes SHACL best practice
9 Label Language Gap Info Mixed language-tagged and plain labels Linked Data best practice
10 Deep Hierarchy Info Hierarchy depth >7 levels Poveda-Villalón (2014), P06
11 Cyclic SubClassOf Error Class is subclass of itself (circular) OWL 2 Specification
12 Excessive Multi-Inheritance Warning Class with >3 direct superclasses Rector et al. (2004)
13 Missing Comment Info Class without rdfs:comment Linked Data best practice
14 Ambiguous Namespace Warning Same local name in different namespaces Unique naming practice
15 Potential Symmetric Info Property used bidirectionally but not declared symmetric OWL modeling practice
16 Deprecated Entity Used Warning owl:deprecated entity still referenced OWL 2 deprecation
17 Redundant SubClassOf Info SubClassOf already implied by chain (A<B<C + A<C) Poveda-Villalón (2014), P24

References

  • Poveda-Villalón, M., Suárez-Figueroa, M.C., Gómez-Pérez, A. (2014). Validating Ontologies with OOPS! Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2012.
  • Rector, A.L., Drummond, N., Horridge, M. et al. (2004). OWL Pizzas: Practical Experience of Teaching OWL-DL. EKAW 2004.
  • Gangemi, A., Catenacci, C., Ciaramita, M., Lehmann, J. (2006). Modelling Ontology Evaluation and Validation. ESWC 2006.