Call for Contributions: 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 (Semantic Technology Lab, 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.

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.daquin@open.ac.uk 
, with CC to aldo.gangemi@cnr.it.
Any question regarding this special issue can be addressed to Mathieu  
d'Aquin (m.daquin@open.ac.uk)