Survey on Defining Practices in Ontologies: Report Summary

Ontologies built using OBO Foundry principles are advised to include both formal (logical) definitions and natural language definitions. Depending on the effort, one or the other can be underrepresented. Possible explanations to this bottleneck are the high cost of producing well-written definitions; an insufficient understanding of the nature of natural language definitions or of logic; the lack of an operational theory of definitions; the lack of studies that evaluate usability and effectiveness of definitions in ontologies; a paucity of tools to help with definition authoring and checking. Producing natural language definitions is time-consuming, costly and prone to all kinds of inconsistencies. Producing logical definitions that are effective, correct, and communicative is also difficult. It is therefore worth exploring different ways of assisting, with automation, creation and quality control of definitions. Accordingly, we thought it would be useful to gather interested researchers and developers to reflect upon general themes as the selection and modeling of defining information; the relation between definitions in specific domains as opposed to domain-independent definitions; the theoretical underpinnings of definitions; tools that can facilitate relating logical and natural language definitions. In addition, we wanted to encourage participation by different communities using definitions so that their needs can be exposed. To address these issues, we organized a half-day workshop aimed at discussing questions, ideas and existing projects regarding definitions in ontologies. The expected outcomes of the workshop were to get an overall view of the needs of the users so as to best orient research on the definition authoring side, as well as to get a diagnosis of the difficulties faced by the latter in order to guide groundwork on definitions and their production. We present here the results of the survey on defining practices that was conducted in preparation of the general discussion at the workshop. 2. Objectives The objective was to gather information on the practices and needs of the ontology community with respect to definitions – logical and textual – in order to guide the discussion session aimed at creating a prioritized list of needs and best practices in definitions. We invited the ontology community to give us feedback on their experience by filling in a questionnaire published on the Internet. The web-based survey was sent to several ontology lists; 14 people responded to the questionnaire. The small number of participants does not allow us to draw statistically