Re: Quality Criteria for SKOS vocabularies

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your suggestions, taking the time domain into account 
really would be an interesting extension. I will definitely include this 
into my work because in my project I also want to be able to compare the 
quality of a vocabulary at different stages of development.

For now (and I think I should have made this point more explicit in my 
document) I would like to focus on criteria that can be calculated from 
the vocabularies as they exist on the web without providing additional 
information. So far I didn't think about weighting the criteria because 
that would require additional knowledge.

@all: Thank you for the input so far, I will reflect on all your 
suggestions! Especially it seems I have to be more precise in VQC7 and VQC8.

Best,
Christian


On 04/12/2011 08:23 PM, Simon Reinhardt wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
> If different versions of a vocabulary are maintained then they could be
> used to measure changes to it. Quality criteria could be:
> - Up-to-dateness (when was the last change?)
> - Number of structural changes (more of these could decrease the quality
> because you can't rely on the vocabulary being stable)
> - Number of documentary changes (these would seem to indicate that the
> documentation gets fixed and completed so more are better)
> The last two should be seen relative to the amount of time between the
> changes.
>
> Maybe you could also take into account (if such data is available) how
> many editors collaborated on the vocabulary.
>
> For the Linked Data aspect maybe the W3C group notes [1] and [2] are
> relevant. I think I've seen a website somewhere that tests for these
> recipes but I can't remember where now. I've seen too many ontologies
> out there that are served with the wrong content type or aren't
> reachable by resolving their URIs and I think that's a very important
> aspect for SKOS vocabularies as well.
> A very basic requirement in a similar vein would be if the file is
> parsable at all, so if it has any syntax errors in the format being
> used. VQC8 is similar but I guess if the file isn't machine readable you
> can't even get as far as calculating that. :-)
>
> Do you think it would make sense to attach a weight to each criterion so
> that you can calculate an overall quality index? Or do you think this
> depends too much on the requirements of the vocabulary user?
>
> And do you want to list any criteria that aren't easily computable? Like
> how well researched and referenced the concepts are and how well they
> are grounded in reality or scientific research in the area.
>
> Regards,
> Simon
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
>
>
> Christian Mader wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In the course of my PhD project at the University of Vienna I'm going
>> to address the question how to programmatically support collaborative
>> creation of "good-quality" SKOS vocabularies. I have found 14 criteria
>> that, in my opinion, could be used to assess the quality of said
>> vocabularies. It would be really helpful for me to get some community
>> input on these criteria, so I published them here:
>>
>> https://github.com/cmader/qSKOS/wiki/Quality-Criteria-for-SKOS-Vocabularies
>>
>>
>> Please feel free to post your comments and suggestions regarding that
>> matter, every kind of input will be warmly appreciated.
>>
>> Best,
>> Christian
>>
>
>

-- 
Research Group Multimedia Information Systems
Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Vienna

Postal Address: Liebiggasse 4/3-4, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 1 4277 39623, Fax: +43 1 4277 39649
E-Mail: christian.mader@univie.ac.at

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 09:17:28 UTC