The interoperability evaluation has the goal of evaluating the interoperability of semantic technologies in terms of the ability that such technologies have to interchange ontologies and use them.

In concrete terms, the evaluation takes into account the case of interoperability using an interchange language, that is, when an ontology is interchanged by storing it in a shared resource (e.g., a fileserver, a web server, or an ontology repository) and is formalised using a certain ontology language.

In the evaluation we need an automatic and uniform way of accessing most of the semantic tools, and the operations performed to access such tools must be supported by most of them. Due to the high heterogeneity in semantic tools, ontology management APIs vary from one tool to another. Therefore, the way chosen to automatically access the tools is through the following two operations commonly supported by most semantic tools: to import an ontology from a file (i.e., to load an ontology from a file into the tool internal model), and to export an ontology to a file (i.e., to store an ontology from the tool internal model into a file).

During the experiment, a common group of tests is executed and each test describes one input ontology that has to be interchanged between a single tool and the others (including the tool itself).

Each test execution comprises two sequential steps. Let start with a file containing an ontology. The first step (Step 1) consists in importing the file with the ontology into the origin tool and then exporting the ontology to a file. The second step (Step 2) consists in importing the file with the ontology exported by the origin tool into the destination tool and then exporting the ontology to another file.

After a test execution, we have three ontologies in the ontology representation language, namely, the original ontology, the intermediate ontology exported by he first tool, and the final ontology exported by the second tool. By comparing these ontologies we can know up to what extent the tools are interoperable.

The only requirement for performing the evaluation on two tools is that the tools are able of importing and exporting ontologies in the ontology language. Therefore, this evaluation can be performed not only on ontology engineering tools but also on other types of semantic technologies (e.g., ontology repositories).