Ontology Summit 2007 - Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions

Ontology Summit 2007 - Objective  

Building upon the successful model of last year's UpperOntologySummit, co-sponsors from NIST, Ontolog, MITRE, NCOR, NCBO, NLM/NIH, W3C, TagCommons, IBM Research and others (a developing list) are initiating a second summit during the spring of 2007.

We are hoping to convene key players in both research and applications who profess in developing or facilitating the evolution of "ontologies" and structures that help model semantics, to join us in our Ontology Summit 2007 activity to help everyone understand the distinctions between Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy and all the terms in between that various communities employ to label those "ontologies" or "structures."  

The challenge, this year, put before the various constituencies and communities involved, is to clarify what everyone means when they use the term "ontology" or when they refer to these semantic structures. Our objective is to define and agree to a systematic means of categorizing the many kinds of things that fall broadly within the "ontology" spectrum. By doing so, the research, development and Internet communities would have a better way of comparing, combining and mapping ontologies to one another (apples to apples). The range of what people call "ontologies" covers folksonomies, taxonomies, thesauri, conceptual models, and formal logic-based models to name just a few flavors.

Community Survey - Project ID: ontology-summit-2007-2h

Our theme for OntologySummit2007 is: "Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions"

As Dr. Steve Ray of NIST explained during our 18-Jan-2007 Ontology Summit launch meeting, rather than to "bludgeon the world into using a single definition", we want to "provide a means of identifying what kind of "ontology" you are talking about.  

At our organizing committee conference call, when the above "tag line" was adopted, Dr. Olivier Bodenreider (NLM) drew a rather appropriate analogy by saying, "we want to be USGS*, and not the UN*." ... Yes, conveners of OntologySummit2007 should look at themselves as cartographers, not peace keepers!  [* USGS = U.S. Geological Survey; UN = United Nations.]

We don't plan to go around telling people how they should use the term "ontology". Instead, we are planning to solicit input from people who could represent perspectives of different constituencies that are involved in developing or facilitating the evolution of "ontologies" and structures that help model semantics. We want these people (experts, practitioners and informed layman alike) to provide input from the perspectives of their constituencies.

... Hence this survey. Thank you, in advance, for your input and for sharing with us your insight on the matter.

Please send this in by end-of-day Tue 27-Mar-2007.

Remarks:

• Please note that the nominal, "open," Ontolog IPR policy will apply.
  
• You are encouraged to review the covering message related to this survey if you haven't read it previously. Several clarifications have been posted to that thread in response to questions about this survey. Therefore, if you start to find things confusing, please follow that message thread (or other hyperlinks on this page that will lead you to relevant exterrnal resources).
  
• Except as confirmed under item 5, respondents are providing their input as individuals, and not as representives of their employers or organizations they are affiliated with, when providing their input in this survey.
  
• Organization names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and expertise self-assessment are collected to facilitate analysis and follow-up only. They will remain private and will not be published.
  
• For responses to essay-type questions (e.g. 3abcd or 4x2), please try to answer with a few bullet points, or if you are going to respond in an essay, please help by summarizing it in 3~5 bullet points at the top of it. Please feel free to just spend a few minutes on this, or spend hours.
• Lastly, except for your name* and e-mail address*, all fields are optional. Fill this out the way it will make sense to you or your community (not anyone else).
  

Name*:
Organization:
Phone No:
E-mail*:

Formal ontology communities
Semantic Web communities
Linguistic communities
Concept Map community
Topic Map community
SEARCH communities
Web 2.0 communities
Thesauri community
Taxonomy communities
Metadata communities
XML communities
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communities
System Architecture communities
Biomedical communities
Standards Development communities
Other (please specify)

2aRepresenting. I represent the perspective of the following constituency/community (please pick one; if you want to provide input from more than one perspective, please return a separate form):

Formal ontology communities
Semantic Web communities
Linguistic communities
Concept Map community
Topic Map community
SEARCH communities
Web 2.0 communities
Thesauri community
Taxonomy communities
Metadata communities
XML communities
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communities
System Architecture communities
Biomedical communities
Standards Development communities
Other (please specify)

2bSpecificCommunity.  - ref: a list of the various "constituencies" (communities and sub-communities) that constitute our stakeholders.

Specific community or sub-community I am affiliated with:

informed layman
practitioner
expert
other (please specify)

• (A)   what you (or members of your constituency) mean when you use the term "ontology" or other ontology-related terms (such as "taxonomy", "schema", "tag cloud") that are commonly used in your community;
  
• (B)   representative ontology or ontology-related artifacts (such as "BFO", "PSL", "Dublin Core", "Gene Ontology", "NCI Thesaurus", "WordNet", "FOAF", "deli.cio.us tag cloud" , ... etc.) which you can enter independently or as a representative example of a "term"; and
  
• (C)  any additional remarks about the cited "artifact" (or implementations of  the cited "term"), for example, how it is used (for: Information integration, Classification, Reasoning, Indexing/Retrieval, Data exchange, ... etc.), issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.

4aGlossary. Ontology-related 'vocabulary' and representative 'artifact' from your constituency or community:

(A.1) Term
(A.2) Gloss / definition
(A.3) Reference (citation/url)
(B.1) Artifact (name/version)
(B.2) - Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4a2AdditionalRemarks.  (C)  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4b2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4c2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4d2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4e2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4f2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4g2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

Term
Gloss / definition
Reference (citation/url)
Artifact (name/version)
- Artifact Ref. (url)

1 - totally unlikely
2 - rarely
3 - sometimes
4 - quite often
5 - almost always

4h2AdditionalRemarks.  Please provide additional remarks on the cited artifact below (how it is applied, issues encountered, improvement wish list, etc.):

• a 'convener' is a participant who provides substantive contribution to the OntologySummit2007 initiative (through the online discourse, this survey, and other events leading to or during the workshops and the written communique process), and

• a 'co-sponsor' is an organization who is providing technical or funding support (e.g. supporting member(s) of its technical staff to participate as a 'convener'), and/or endorsing the objective of this OntologySummit2007,

I agree that my name can be listed as a 'convener' of OntologySummit2007
I will consider endorsing the OntologySummit2007 communique. Please send it to me for review when it is ready. I will confirm my endorsement after the review.
I confirm that you may list my organization as a 'co-sponsor' for OntologySummit2007 (details below).

5aCoSponsor.

Organization Name:
Link (url) to Logo