This year's Ontology Summit is titled "Ontology Evaluation Across the Ontology Lifecycle".

Ontologies represent a shared understanding about concepts and relationships of a domain. They help manage and exploit information. Ontologies clarify meaning among people in the form of explicit knowledge that can be executed by software. They model processes and decision-making. And, they improve agility and flexibility while reducing costs.

Developing a good ontology requires human understanding of the domain, logic, reasoning, and clarity about the intended use. A good ontology enables automated application of logic and reasoning in ways that reduce unnecessary complexity and/or improve efficiency of solutions. More information on what ontologies are can be found in the results of a prior ontology summit [1]

Currently, there is no agreed methodology for development of ontologies, and there are no universally agreed metrics for ontology evaluation. At the same time, everybody agrees that there are a lot of badly engineered ontologies out there, thus people use -- at least implicitly -- some criteria for the evaluation of ontologies.

The goal for Ontology Summit 2013 is to identify best practices for ontology development and evaluation. We will consider the entire lifecycle of an ontology -- from requirements gathering and analysis, through to design and implementation. In this endeavor, the Summit will seek collaboration with the software engineering and knowledge acquisition communities. Research in these fields has led to several mature models for the software lifecycle and the design of knowledge-based systems, and we expect that fruitful interaction among all participants will lead to a consensus for a methodology within ontological engineering. Following earlier Ontology Summit practice, the synthesized results of this season's discourse will be published as a Communiqué.

As is traditional with the Ontology Summit series , the results will be captured in the form of a communique, with expanded supporting material provided on the web.