Ontology Outreach Advisory

Experienced ontologists are invited and encouraged to contribute to this recommendation, by submitting guidelines based on their best practice and research findings. A guideline is not necessarily a rigid assessment criterion or a theory, but can also be a methodological recommendation that guides ontology builders to achieve better quality, reusability and/or adoption. Not every guideline includes a formal technical specification, nor can every recommendation be embodied by support from authoring tools; each is intended to be directly comprehensible by industrial users and applicable in a wide range of industry settings. While some guidelines are interrelated, each is self-contained and can be followed independently of the others.

The collected guidelines will be refined to arrive at more agreement. Where there is eventual disagreement, the differing opinions will be clearly documented. All guidelines will be reformulated where appropriate to provide a coherent approach to ontology content. Each guideline should be easy to understand and apply by normal ontology engineers or non-technical domain experts.

Guideline collection will be performed online, using the web site of the OOA as platform. Specific guideline templates have been designed and provided in the content management system, and a review procedure has been set up as a work flow to allow a few cycles of comments (Delphi method) before a guideline will be released as ‘formally recommended’. However this procedure will not be closed until formal release. The transient status of a not-yet-released guideline will be made clear, but since the whole idea is to get comments and feedback, even preliminary guidelines will be accessible. The process will closely follow the well-known and established RFC process of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This model calls for an open submission using quite strict format and procedure requirements, a review and revision by a small group of renowned specialists, and a cycle of publish-and-feedback. The OOA plans to have a continuous process in place, to avoid an unnecessary long interval between submission and approval/dissemination of a new guideline.