Review Comment:
This paper describes the approach followed to build the EarthCollab ontology focusing on the reuse activity. In general, the work presented in interesting in terms of ontological development applied to a given use case.
My main concern about the paper is whether it fits the "full paper" track instead of reshaping it for the "ontology description" track. I mean, if the proposed approach for reusing ontologies is considered the paper's contribution, such approach should be described in terms of methodological guidelines or method description and it would be nice to evaluate it through several uses cases in different domains. Then, it also should be compared with the ontology reuse state of the art. If we considered the resulting ontology, which is partially described in the paper, the contribution of the paper, IMO it would fit better in the "ontology description track".
Considering that the paper would be submitted to the ontology track I would propose the following modifications apart from the guidelines for ontology descriptions provided by the journal (http://semantic-web-journal.net/authors#types):
1.- First of all the ontology should be available on-line. If it is not public, the reviewers should be able to access to it under some arrangement. This would also apply to the full paper submission, I would have liked to see the ontology and check it.
2.- Provide an overview of the methodology used to develop the ontology, not only for the reuse activity, but the entire development, including the ontology evaluation.
3.- Regarding the related work about ontology reuse, I would suggest to consider to include references to or taking these approaches into account along the development:
.-- Reuse of domain ontologies in: Suárez-Figueroa, M. C. (2010). NeOn Methodology for building ontology networks: specification, scheduling and reuse (Doctoral dissertation, Informatica).
.-- Schaible, J., Gottron, T., & Scherp, A. (2014). Survey on common strategies of vocabulary reuse in linked open data modeling. In The Semantic Web: Trends and Challenges (pp. 457-472). Springer International Publishing.
.-- Reuse of Ontology Design Patterns in: Presutti, V., Blomqvist, E., Daga, E., and Gangemi, A. (2012). Pattern-Based Ontology Design. In Suárez-Figueroa, M. d. C., Gómez-Pérez, A., Motta, E., and Gangemi, A., editors, Ontology Engineering in a Networked World., pages 35–64. --> ODP reuse might be useful for addressing the "event" modelling issue described in 7.2.
4.- In the introduction, the sentence "The principle of the “open world” is another key component of the Semantic Web, stipulating that new statements about Semantic Web resources are always possible, and that there should be no assumption that a URI uniquely refers to an individual resource [14]." is confusing. I would suggest to rephrase it making a separation between the Open World Assumption and the non unique naming assumption. In fact, the last part should be review to make clear that in Semantic Web one should assume that a URI uniquely refers to one resource, what one can not assume is that there is only one URI to identify a given resource. That is, two or more URIs can refer to the same resource.
5.- Notation used in figures should be clarified. While it is clear in figures 3, 4 and 5, the symbols and representation used in figures 6 and 7 is confusing. Do hexagons represent instances? In that case, would that it means that in Fig 6 the instance "Norwegian Polar Institute" is related to the class "foaf:Person" by means of the property "ec:hasLiason"? In that case, the ontology would fail under the OWL full profile, is that intended? In general, it seems that the representation is mixing the conceptual and the data level. It is also not clear what does mind the hexagons behind the "skos:ConcpetShcema" class in Fig 7, rdf:type maybe?
|