Abstract
Ontology is an important artifact of Semantic Web applications. Today, there are an enormous number of ontologies available on the Web. Even so, finding and identifying the right ontology is not easy. This is because the majority of ontologies are either not described or described with a general-purpose metadata vocabulary like Dublin Core. On the other hand, ontology construction, irrespective of its types (e.g., general ontology, domain ontology, application ontology), is an expensive affair both in terms of human resources and other infrastructural resources. Hence, the ideal situation would be to reuse the existing ontologies to reduce the development effort and cost, and also to improve the quality of the original ontology. In the current work we present an ontology metadata vocabulary called Metadata for Ontology Description and publication (MOD). To design the vocabulary, we also propose a set of generic guiding principles and a well-established methodology which take into account real concerns of the ontology users and practitioners.
The copyright for articles is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to DCMI for publication in the electronic and print proceedings. By virtue of their appearance in this open access publication, articles are free to be used with proper attribution for educational and other non-commercial purposes. Other uses may require the permission of the author(s).