An Empirical Mindset for Ontology Engineering Research

16^th February 2016, 13:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr Bijan Parsia
School of Computer Science
Manchester University

Abstract

Description based ontology engineering has experienced strong growth over the past two decades with ever more expressive languages, diverse support services, and effective implementations of those services. Tens of thousands of ontologies written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are available on the web and some OWL ontologies (such as SNOMED-CT or the NCI Thesaurus) have been in continuous development for over 10 years.

The old saw (attributed to Frank Harary) goes, "If a field has 'science' in it's name, it probably isn't a science". However, science, especially narrowly construed, is not co-extensive with fields that use various empirical methods. For example, software engineering has become increasingly empirically sophisticated. In this talk, I will discuss various trends in empirical ontology engineering research and rising methodological and sociological challenges.