Towards quantitative measures in applied ontology
This work aims to improve research methodologies in applied ontology, an interdisciplinary field, by introducing evaluation frameworks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without presenting new empirical results.
The paper addresses the need for evaluating research results in applied ontology by proposing that evaluations should be domain-specific and based on ontology-based tasks, and it discusses quantitative measures to enable objective assessment and comparison.
Applied ontology is a relatively new field which aims to apply theories and methods from diverse disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and formal logics to perform or improve domain-specific tasks. To support the development of effective research methodologies for applied ontology, we critically discuss the question how its research results should be evaluated. We propose that results in applied ontology must be evaluated within their domain of application, based on some ontology-based task within the domain, and discuss quantitative measures which would facilitate the objective evaluation and comparison of research results in applied ontology.