Re: Any reason for ontology reuse?

Martin's message raises an interesting question, to which I don't have an easy answer...
On Dec 4, 2010, at 11:07  - 04/12/10, Martin Hepp wrote:

> Simple rules:
> 
> 1. It is better to use an existing ontology than inventing your own.
> 2. It is better to use the most popular existing ontology than a less popular existing ontology.
Let's assume I like this rule and want to follow it.
How can we measure the popularity of an ontology? Simply counting the number of triples in the LoD cloud that have a URI from it?
The problem with this, in my view, is that measuring a single "term" (class, property) is not really indicative. As many people mix and match terms from different ontologies, the popularity of a single (or small subset) of terms may not be a good indicator of the popularity of the *whole* ontology (when you would really benefit from the ontology engineering effort put into it, as pointed out by others).
I'd love to hear different takes on this.
*If* we can come up with a good metric, this could be reported in existing directories/lists, and help users tremendously (although I can also see another can of worms opening up, but I won't go into this for now).


Cheers
Daniel
---
Daniel Schwabe                      Dept. de Informatica, PUC-Rio
Tel:+55-21-3527 1500 r. 4356        R. M. de S. Vicente, 225<br>
Fax: +55-21-3527 1530               Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22453-900, Brasil
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~dschwabe

Received on Saturday, 4 December 2010 18:52:33 UTC