NIST-Ontolog-NCOR Mini-Series: Ontology Measurement and Evaluation - Kick-off Session - Dr. Steven Ray, Dr. Chris Welty et al. - Thu 19-Oct-2006

* Subject NIST-Ontolog-NCOR Mini-Series: "Ontology Measurement and Evaluation" Kick-off Session, with Dr. Steven Ray, Dr. Chris Welty et al. * Date Thursday, October 19, 2006 * ONTOLOG Forum session page (with agenda and link to slides) http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2006_10_19 * Session Abstract (by Steve Ray) This mini-series will explore the landscape, issues and solutions relating to the measurement, evaluation, quality and testing of ontologies. * Pertinent Issues we might explore during this and subsequent sessions, such as: o 1. Why do we need to care about ontology quality? o 2. What are objective means of classifying something as an ontology, taxonomy, data model, semantic networks, or tagged markup, etc. o 3. How can ontologies be evaluated and measured? o 4. How can the quality of Ontology Design Tools be assessed? ... and so on. * Keynote Presentation Titles and Abstracts: ** Ontology Quality and the Semantic Web - Dr. Christopher A. Welty Abstract: One of the guiding principles of the web and its machine interpretable successor the semantic web is to "let a million flowers bloom." HTML was based on technology nearly two decades old at the time (Hypertext), for which a research community concerned mainly with Human-Computer interaction was investigating what the "right way" to use hypertext for effective communication was. The vast majority of early HTML pages completely ignored this and yet the web thrived. Still, as the web became a serious medium for dissemination, institutions for whom effective communication was critical did begin to take this research seriously and today's highly visible web pages are designed by people with experience and training on how to "do it right". The progress and evolution of the semantic web should follow the same path - the semantic web standards (RDF, OWL, and RIF) are based on decades-old technology from Knowledge Representation and Databases, and there has been for about 15 years a research community associated with this field that has studied what the "right way" to use these systems is. This field, which I will call "ontology engineering" for this talk, is concerned among other things with ontology quality and its impact. In this talk I will discuss research on characterizing ontology quality and measuring the impact of quality on knowledge-based systems.