User Ratings of Ontologies: Who Will Rate the Raters?
Natalya Fridman Noy, Ramanathan V. Guha, Mark A. Musen · 2005
The number of ontologies and knowledge bases covering different domains and available on the World-Wide Web is steadily growing. As more ontologies are available, it is becoming harder, and not easier, for users to find ontologies they need. How do they evaluate if a particular ontology is appropriate for their task? How do they choose among many ontologies for the same domain? We argue that allowing users on the Web to annotate and review ontologies is an important step in facilitating ontology evaluation and reuse for others. However, opening the system to everyone on the Web poses a problem of trust: Users must be able to identify reviews and annotations that are useful for them. We discuss the kinds of metadata that we can collect from users and authors of ontologies in the form of annotations and reviews, explore the use of an Open Rating System for evaluating ontologies and knowledge sources, and present a brief overview of a Web-based browser for Protégé ontologies that enables users to annotate information in ontologies. Ontologies On The Web Scale The number of ontologies and knowledge bases covering different domains and available on the World-Wide Web is steadily growing. Ontologies constitute the backbone of the Semantic Web and their number is steadily growing. The Swoogle crawler, 1 for example, indexes more than 4000 ontologies at the time of this writing. It is commonly agreed that one of the reasons ontologies became popular is because they hold a promise of facilitating interoperation between software resources by virtue of being shared agreed-upon descriptions of domains used by different agents. Such interoperation is, for example, a key requirement for the Semantic Web to succeed. Suppose we are developing a Semantic Web service that uses an ontology. If we choose to reuse an existing ontology to support our service rather than to create a new one, we get the interoperation with the others using the same ontology “for free. ” In addition,