NorPOnt: Creation of a domain ontology for S R Ranganathan’s normative principles in library and information science

Abstract

S. R. Ranganathan formulated several rules and guidelines for classification and cataloguing, and normative principles are one among them. The present study aims to develop an ontology on normative principles (NorPOnt) so that it will improve data connection, knowledge representation, and search strategies. Protégé software was utilised to develop the ontology and the built-in Pellet Reasoner Plug-in was used to investigate for inconsistencies and found none. Competency questions (CQs) were created to measure the satisfaction level of select experts in using the ontology. The mean satisfactory level was found to be 3.24, which indicates that satisfactory and highly satisfactory were the two most common responses. The ontology’s quality was also assessed using the FOCA method. After the computation, the quality value (μ) was discovered to be 0.992, which is near 1, signifying excellent quality. The evaluation results show that NorPOnt is an ontology with few inconsistencies and could answer the CQs better with higher quality.