Review Comment:
This manuscript was submitted as 'Ontology Description' and should be reviewed along the following dimensions: (1) Quality and relevance of the described ontology (convincing evidence must be provided). (2) Illustration, clarity and readability of the describing paper, which shall convey to the reader the key aspects of the described ontology.
The article reports on an ontology for e-goverment. The main topic is interesting but the work does not seem to have sufficient maturity for publication.
The main issues are:
* There is no mention of the methodology adopted to build the ontology. How the requirements have been collected/formalised? A discussion of this in the light of good practices in ontology engineering should be included.
* The authors make the argument of the "generality" of the ontology. Define and explain the scope (competence) of the ontology is an important thing, I believe governmental institutions are involved in a large number of activities while the use case illustrated covers only finding offices and documentation about (some? all?) procedures. I appreciate this is an important matter but describing one use case does not seem enough to demonstrate the generality of the model. Personally, I don't even believe the most important property of an ontology is to be general. Instead, a good model should be appropriate for the task. Both the task and the solution are not presented well enough.
* The paper fails on describing how the ontology informs the system (app) produced. It is given for granted that having an ontology is a good thing. A perfectly working app may be produced without it, isn't it? What's so special about having an ontology?
* The discussion of related work is insufficient as the authors don't go into any details related to the coverage and expressivity of the model (types, relations, etc...).
* Another way of putting it: what is the contribution (ontology) that others can learn from? How can it be reused / extended / etc...?
* Finally, both the quality and the relevance of the ontology are not sufficiently supported in the article in its present form.
Other remarks:
* Motivations for the work are valid and interesting but the article does not seem to deliver. The details about the ontology and related application do not match the expectations developed in the Introduction and Related Work, particularly in the orchestration element and on the Semantic Web Service architecture.
* About the Related Work section, I don't dislike the historical perspective, also considering this is a Journal article, although it would be easier to structure the literature separating the domain element (e-services of Public Administrations) and the ontology engineering / semantic web element. About the latter, authors should include references to well-established ontology engineering methodologies such as [1][2][3][4] and how they relate to their work.
* The statement at P4, line 30-32, left column, seems a bit shallow: "The applications developed by users aimed at planning, transport, security or emergencies need georeferenced images without having to pay a license for use. This is where services originated in crowd-sourcing appear." Enterprises may find paying for such content totally acceptable. Please introduce the crowd-sourcing element referring to some key publication in the field.
* It is not clear how OpenStreetCam, Wikidata, Semantic Mediawiki, and vCard are related to the presented work.
* On Semantic Mediawiki, please cite [5].
* The initial sentence of Section 2.3 can probably be simplified, it is convoluted with no reason.
* Figure 1 is not a sufficient account of the ontology and the requirements What, Who, How, etc... should be explained in relation to the supported use case.
* I recommend introducing a guide use case, presented in the first part of the article and the used in the latter parts to exemplify the features of the ontology and its application.
* Section 3.3 is confused and the formal math-style explanation of the SPARQL query unneeded. By the way, if that was an SQL query everything would have worked in the same way. I fail to understand what is the benefit of having RDF-based technologies here if there is any.
* The conclusions include a description of the types of the ontology (finally!) but that seems not the right place.
* From the conclusions: "The main limitation of this model is the existence of few scenarios of available services, so there is a need to work to scale the ontology to represent all kinds of procedures and services offered by the public administration.". In the related work section, the authors remark that existing open government ontologies are not exhaustive. I guess this is why past attempts failed. Any new thought/lesson learnt?
[1] Grüninger, M. and Fox, M.S., 1995. The role of competency questions in enterprise engineering. In Benchmarking—Theory and practice (pp. 22-31). Springer, Boston, MA.
[2] Pinto, H. Sofia, Steffen Staab, and Christoph Tempich. "DILIGENT: Towards a fine-grained methodology for Distributed, Loosely-controlled and evolvInG." In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2004), vol. 110, p. 393. 2004.
[3] Presutti, Valentina, Enrico Daga, Aldo Gangemi, and Eva Blomqvist. "eXtreme design with content ontology design patterns." In Proc. Workshop on Ontology Patterns, pp. 83-97. 2009.
[4] Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, and Mariano Fernández-López. "The NeOn methodology for ontology engineering." In Ontology engineering in a networked world, pp. 9-34. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012.
[5] Krötzsch, Markus, Denny Vrandečić, and Max Völkel. "Semantic mediawiki." In International semantic web conference, pp. 935-942. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.
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