Deadline extended to 15th June
Beautiful Ontologies, a special issue of Applied Ontology
Calling experts on ontology modeling, representation and design, as
well as ontology users, to contribute to a special issue of Applied
Ontology on `Beautiful Ontologies'.
Guest editors:
Mathieu d’Aquin (Knowledge Media Institute, the Open University, UK - m.daq...@open.ac.uk
)
Aldo Gangemi (Semantic Technology Lab, ISTC-CNR, Italy - aldo.gang...@cnr.it
)
Deadline: 15th June 2009
Ontologies are design artifacts, to which quality notions like
appropriateness, coverage, efficiency, sustainability, and elegance
apply. Classical approaches to assess the quality of ontologies mostly
involve automatic metrics on the structure of ontologies, unit tests,
or the manual assessment by domain experts, ontology experts or users,
normally using formal, objective criteria.
In this special issue, we want to approach this topic from a different
perspective. We would like to invite internationally recognized
experts on ontology engineering, as well as ontology practitioners and
users to contribute by providing positive examples of good,
interesting and elegant ontology designs – i.e., ‘beautiful
ontologies’. There is no constraint on the chosen ontology, on its
format, on the formalism in which it is implemented, on the domain it
describes, on its creator(s) or even on its 'score' according to
classical evaluation methods. However, each beautiful ontology article
should clearly explain why, according to the author, the chosen
ontology is interesting and how it contributes to the overall
discussion on ontology quality.
By gathering in this way different views on concrete examples, we hope
to achieve a better understanding of quality ontology design,
providing a concrete reference for less experienced ontology
practitioners as well as an ethnographic basis for collecting best
practices in ontology design. As such, this initiative relates
directly to others in the domain, like the OntologyDesignPatterns.org
portal, and might generate direct contributions to them.
Submission
We seek submissions of articles discussing either an existing ontology
as a whole, an ontology module, an ontology design pattern or even a
particular characteristic of an ontology (including the way it has
been used or applied). In order to collect a wide range of
contributions, we encourage the submission of both long and short
papers. In both cases, articles will be selected according to the
journal's standard and high quality will be expected.
Submissions to this special issue will be subject to peer-review.
After a pre-selection step, in order to ensure that the highest
possible quality is achieved for the contributions, the review and
selection process will also include a second phase involving
interactions and discussions between the authors, the guest editors
and, when appropriate, the original creators of the considered
ontologies.
Submissions should be sent by the 1st of June 2009 to m.daq...@open.ac.uk
, with CC to aldo.gang...@cnr.it.
Any question regarding this special issue can be addressed to Mathieu
d'Aquin (m.daq...@open.ac.uk)