Good ontologies?

We have asked you for your thoughts and papers. And you have sent us those -- thank you! 19 submissions, quite a nice number, and the reviewing is still going on.

Now we ask you for your results. Apply your evaluation approaches! We give you four ontologies on the EON2006 website, and we want you to take them and evaluate them. Are these ontologies good? If they are, why? If not, what can be changed? We want practical results, and we want to discuss those results with you!. So we collected four ontologies, all talking about persons, all coming from very different background and with different properties. Enough talking -- let's get down and make our hands dirty by really evaluating these ontologies.

The set is quite nice. Four ontologies. One of them we found over rdfdata.org, a great resource for ontologies, some of them I would have never found myself. We took a list of Elvis impersonators. One person edited the ontology, it is about a clear set of information, basically RDF. The second ontology is the ROVE ontology about the Semantic Web Summer School in Cercedilla last year. It was created by a small team, and is richly axiomatized. Then there is the AIFB ontology, based on the SWRC. It is created out of our Semantic Portal in the AIFB, and edited by all the members of the AIFB -- not all of them experts in the SemWeb. Finally, there's a nice collection of FOAF-files, taken from all over the web, and to be meshed up together and evaluated as one ontology, created with a plethora of different tools, by more than a hundred persons. So there should be an ontology fitting to each of the evaluation approaches.

We had a tough decision to make when choosing the ontologies. In literally the last moment we got the tempting offer to take three or four legal ontologies and to offer those for evaluation. It was hard, and we would have loved to put both ontology sets up to evaluation, but finally decided for the set mentioned previously. The legal ontologies were all of similar types, and certainly would need a domain expert for proper evaluation, which many of the evaluators won't have at hand at the moment. I hope it is the right decision (in research, you usually never know).

The EON2006 workshop will be a great opportunity to bring together all people interested in evaluating ontologies. I read all the submissions, and I am absolutely positive that we will be able to present you with a strong and interesting programme soon. I was astonished how many people have interest in that field, and was intrigued to discover and follow the paths lead out by the authors. I am looking forward to May, and the WWW!