[MOBY-dev] Request for good behaviour

[Phillip Lord]

Mark

Never thought I would see the day, where you asked other people for
good behaviour!


You might be interested in this paper here. They define quality metrics for
ontology definitions. They look quite interesting. Essentially their
metrics pick up two ontological sins: circularlity and
unintelligability. 

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/212


>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com> writes:


  Mark> As I was poking around the Object ontology this morning I
  Mark> noticed some things that made me "cry".  In particular, the
  Mark> way some objects are being defined is... well... not very
  Mark> helpful!

  Mark> The best example is

  Mark> Object Name: "TC" Description: "TC"


This one would fall on the grounds that it's circular -- too many (i.e
all) the words in the name occur in the description, and on the
grounds that it's unintelligable (i.e none of the words in the
description are in anyway meaningful). 


  Mark> Another example

  Mark> Object Name: AvailableMaterial Description: Object containing
  Mark> information about available material

This one is circular and has too many stop words: information, object,
about and containing are always a little suspect in an ontology.


  Mark> I am not sure that, given these descriptions, either of these
  Mark> Objects can be used by anyone other than their original
  Mark> author, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an Object
  Mark> ontology :-)

  Mark> The *king* of good object descriptions has got to be Martin
  Mark> Senger, and I think that some of mine are pretty good too...
  Mark> so here are two examples that show how I think it should be
  Mark> done:

All hail, Martin Senger? King of documentation. 

Cheers

Phil