Elena Paslaru is from Freie Universität Berlin, that’s my university.
She asks the audience to see an ontology as the result of an engineering process, just like a piece of software.
There are many decisions to be made when a complex ontology is needed: Build? Buy? Extract from natural language documents? All at once or incremental? Elena’s group develops a methodology that helps with these decisions by estimating how much the different approaches will cost.
They have elaborate formulas for estimating the costs. E.g. if the project team has less than two months of experience with the knowledge representation experience, then they will need twice as much time as a team of experts with 6+ years of experience. The factors are based on review of literature and case studies
Problem: There’s not enough historical data to actually validate the model.
From the audience: A huge part of the costs is in maintenance. (The model includes maintenance costs.)
[I don’t quite buy into this. Does anybody actually have the problem that they need and ontology but don’t know how expensive it will be? I’d have appreciated some concrete examples demonstrating the need. Well, I’m just one of these lower case semantic web people.]