Ontology Summit 2007 Survey Response Analysis

Analysis Team: Ken Baclawski (lead), Doug Holmes, PeterYim

The preliminary analysis (work-in-progress) includes a number of reports displaying the responses.

Communities

• Community memberships were very diverse. All 15 communities listed in the survey had at least six members, and 19 other communities were added by respondents.
• Surprisingly, neither the Semantic Web nor the Formal ontology communities had the largest membership, although both were in the top 5. However the sample is too small for this to be a significant effect.
• Community representatives were also very diverse, with 24 communities having at least one representative, although many of them have significant overlap with others.
• The best represented communities were:
  • Formal ontology (8)
  • Applications development (6)
  • Standards development (6)
  • Web 2.0 (5)
  • Biomedical (5)
• Surprisingly, the Semantic Web was not in the top 5 in the list of represented communities. Again the sample is too small for this to be a significant effect.

Community memberships and representatives

Ontology: Value & Issues, as well as Problems & Solutions

The answers to the four questions in part 3 (Value & Issues, as well as Problems & Solutions for Ontologies) were arranged by the community being represented. While many issues are common to all communities, some communities have community-specific issues.

Answers to the questions in part 3 arranged by community

Glossary

The survey responses included nearly 100 terms of various kinds. The following statistics were computed for an earlier version of the analysis so they are no longer accurate, but they are still approximately correct:

• 41 terms synonymous with or similar to "ontology"
• 4 ontology languages
• 14 examples of ontologies (included with the other ontology artifacts below)
• 36 terms within an ontology
• 4 other terms

Alphabetical list of terms for "ontology"

Reference links for ontology terminology

List of terms ordered by evaluation

Terms of all kinds

Ontology Artifacts

The survey responses included over 100 ontologies. Some duplication has not yet been eliminated.

Ontologies arranged by ontology term

Ontologies arranged by ontology term and sorted by evaluation within each term

Ontology remarks

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This page is maintained by: Ken Baclawski

Please forward any modifications and updates to the content above, along with the change justification, to him for posting.

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Comment Section

• Question: in your "Terms synonymous or similar to 'ontology'" does the column 'Evaluation' reflect data collected under the survey question "[[CalledAnOntology]]. On a scale of 1 to 5, (where 1 means totally unlikely and 5 means almost always), would the above term or artifact be referred to as an "ontology" in your community?"
  • if so, maybe using the column label "[[CalledAnOntology]]" may still be appropriate, as it is related to context as well (e.g. a formal ontologist may not refer to a tag cloud as an "ontology", but maybe, a third of the web 2.0 crowd might.) (--from Peter P. Yim / 2007.04.11-13:43 PDT)

• Inadvertent Omissions: two fairly important artifacts (listed below) seems to have been left out. No one had included them in their returned survey response, probably because they were already used in the example (and people assumed the organizers already knew about them.) Therefore, please add them back. (--suggested by Peter P. Yim / 2007.04.11-13:48 PDT)
  • Artifact (name/version) - Dublin Core
    • Artifact Ref. (url) - http://dublincore.org/
  • Artifact (name/version) - FOAF ("Friend-of-a-fried") vocabulary specification
    • Artifact Ref. (url) - http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/