The role of community and social metrics in ontology evaluation: An interview study of ontology reuse

Finding a "good" or the "right" ontology for reuse is an ongoing challenge in the field of ontology engineering, where the main aim is to share and reuse existing semantics. This paper reports on a qualitative study with interviews of ontologists and knowledge engineers in different domains, ranging from biomedical field to manufacturing industry, and investigates the challenges they face while searching, evaluating, and selecting an ontology for reuse. Analysis of the interviews reveals diverse sets of quality metrics that are used when evaluating the quality of an ontology. While some of the metrics have already been mentioned in the literature, the findings from our study identify new sets of quality metrics such as community and social related metrics. We believe that this work represents a noteworthy contribution to the field of ontology engineering, with the hope that the research community can further draw on these initial findings in developing relevant quality metrics and ontology search and selection