On the Effect of Ontologies on Quality of Web Applications

The semantic Web can be seen as means to improve qualitative characteristics of Web applications. Ontologies play a key role in the semantic Web and, therefore, are expected to have a profound effect on quality of a Web application. We apply the Quint2 model to predict an impact of an ontology on a number of quality dimensions of a Web application. We estimate that an ontology is likely to significantly improve the functionality and maintainability dimensions. The usability dimension is affected to a lesser extent. We explain the expected increase of quality with improved effectiveness of development process caused primarily by application domain ontologies