CFC: Beautiful Ontologies, a special issue of the Applied Ontology

Call for Contributions: Beautiful Ontologies, a special issue of the
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.daquin@open.ac.uk)
Aldo Gangemi (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy -
aldo.gangemi@cnr.it)

Deadline: 1st 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.

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.daquin@open.ac.uk, with CC to aldo.gangemi@cnr.it.

Received on Friday, 20 February 2009 17:22:23 UTC