[ontology-summit] [Quality] Kicking-off the Quality Cross-track Conversa

[Amanda Vizedom <amanda.vizedom@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

The purpose of this email is two-fold: to let you know of (seed) material now populating the Quality Cross-track Comminity Input wiki page athttp://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2012_Quality_CommunityInput, and to initiate email discussion under the "[Quality]" subject header.

On the wiki page now, in addition to the cross-track mission statement offered at our second session, we've extracted some comments, questions and topics relevant to the A1 Cross-track topic of Ontology Quality for Large Systems. Plenty of content has emerged already; by gathering it together under the cross track, we hope to facilitate discussion of relevant ontology quality issues that cut across the summit's tracks.

Rather than repeating points from the wiki page, we'll just point you there to peruse and comment as you wish. Remember, this is a community input page; it exists to receive and transmit your ideas and questions to each other. All are encouraged to add to the content of the community input pages by editing directly.

So, instead of summarizing that content, we'd like to ask you some questions.  These are some question that we see arising frequently when people start out aiming to incorporate ontologies into large-scale systems. Do you have experience facing or addressing these questions? Do you have other quality- related questions that you would like to see addressed? Share your thoughts on this email list, including "[Quality]" in the subject line (as done for this message), or add them to the wiki page, or both.

Let's say that you are building a large system and you want to use ontology somewhere in it. How do you know what ontology you need? Should you build it yourself? If so, how do you know what to aim for, and whether you're building the right thing? How do you know when it's done? How do you know whether it is good?  Are there ontologies already out there that you might use? How do you know if they are a good fit? How do you know if they are any good? Were there things about existing ontologies which in retrospect made them not a good fit to what you needed them for?


We would like to see perspectives on these questions both for ontologies used in semantic technology applications as part of some system or solution, and for ontologies which are of or about some large system. Please try and include enough business background to make it clear what the perceived or intended role of the ontology was to be.


How have you evaluated ontologies in use? Have the evaluation techniques you've used been effective? What has presented a challenge, expected or unexpected? What have you measured and how did you measure it? What do you wish you had a way to measure? Are there intangible features of ontology quality which you have identified but been unable to quantify? How have you dealt with these?


Have you had to revise your ontology content or methodology to make it work in use? If so, what did you have to revise? How did you know it needed revision? Did your changes succeed? Did you need to make changes to the methods by which ontologies were developed?


Were the ontology requirements specified? How broadly or narrowly? How formally or informally? How were the requirements derived? In what terms were they framed?

How much of an impact has any of the above had on your overall ability to successfully incorporate ontologies into an large system? Or your ability to create an ontology of a large system?

We can think of many more questions, but what we really want to do is stimulate your answers and your further questions.  So we'll leave it at that for now.

Your Quality Cross-track Co-champions,
Amanda Vizedom and Mike Bennett

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