Re: data schema / vocabulary / ontology / repositories

Michael,

The ability for OOR users to 'rank' ontologies is
on the OOR list of features, though its rank it 
the priority queue is not that high.

Todd





From:
Michael F Uschold <uschold@gmail.com>
To:
Bob Ferris <zazi@elbklang.net>
Cc:
Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, semantic-web 
<semantic-web@w3.org>
Date:
03/15/2011 09:06 AM
Subject:
Re: data schema / vocabulary / ontology / repositories
Sent by:
semantic-web-request@w3.org



Ranking ontologies is indeed very personal, so is ranking of laptops, 
bicycles and books.  But people rank them all the time. My first port of 
call is always Amazon.  

Might it work to have similar ratings for ontologies and vocabularies? 
 The home for this could be OOR.

Michael 

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 2:15 AM, Bob Ferris <zazi@elbklang.net> wrote:
Hello everybody,

Am 14.03.2011 09:28, schrieb Martin Hepp:

Hi Dieter:

There are several ontology repositories available on-line, but to my 
knowledge they all suffer from two serious limitations:

1. They do not rate ontologies by quality/relevance/popularity, so you do 
not get any hint whether foaf:Organization or foo:Organization will be the 
best way to expose your data.

I think, we discussed this issue already sometime ago. A conclusion (at 
least for me) was that it is quite difficult to achieve such a ranking 
quite objective over a very broad range of ontologies that are available. 
It depends often on the complexity of the knowledge representation (level 
of detail) a developer likes to achieve. This is the advantage of the 
Semantic Web. There wouldn't never be an ontology for a specific domain 
that rules all use case in it well.


2. The selection of ontologies listed is, to say the best, often biased or 
partly a random choice. I do not know any repository that
- has a broad coverage,
- includes the top 25 linked data ontologies and

I think, people are looking for an ontology that fit their purpose, i.e., 
popularity is good, however, it is in that case only a secondary metric*. 
A developer is primarily looking for an appropriate ontology. Not till 
then he/she can investigate further efforts into a comparison of available 
ones, if there are more than one appropriate ontology available.


- lists more non-toy ontologies than abandoned PhD project prototypes.

I don't want to take a concrete position here, however, every ontology 
development has somewhere its starting point and is there usually not so 
popular. Nevertheless, the ontology design can be a good one, too. For 
that reason, why should be abandon these approach and brand them as evil?

I think, we should really investigate more power in enhancements of, e.g., 
Schemapedia. This approach seems to be a quite good one (at least from my 
personal experience). On the other side, something like "ontology 
marketing/advertisement" plays another important role. There are often 
quite good jewels out there that are badly discoverable.


Cheers,


Bob


*) I guess, the biology community wouldn't be quite satisfied when looking 
at the proposed ontology charts, or?




-- 
Michael Uschold, PhD
   Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
   LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu
   Skype, Twitter: UscholdM

Received on Tuesday, 15 March 2011 15:37:57 UTC