1. Ontology Measurement and Evaluation Ontolog mini-series Co-sponsored by NIST, Ontolog and NCOR Steve Ray, NIST October 19, 2006

2. NCOR National Center for Ontological Research http://ncor.us
Goal:
NCOR has the goal of advancing ontological investigation within the United States .…A special focus will be on the establishment of tools and measures for quality assurance of ontologies.
Methodology:
…the development of ontologies can profit from the application of theoretical rigor based in logic and philosophical ontology.

3. ONTOLOG (aka. Ontolog Forum) est. Apr.2002 our "dialog in ontology"
Membership ; from 18 different countries (as at end Sep-2006)
Users - from 115 cities globally, generating over 1500 visits and more than 10,000 hits on our site per day
Hosted on the CIM3 collaborative work environment infrastructure
Charter - Ontolog is an open, international, virtual community of practice, whose membership will:
Discuss practical issues and strategies associated with the development and application of both formal and informal ontologies.
Identify ontological engineering approaches that might be applied to the UBL effort, as well as to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts.
Strive to advance the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and to help move them into main stream applications.
Activities:
Weekly conference calls of active members
Monthly virtual Invited Speaker events
Scheduled Technical Discussions
Specific Projects: like [CCT-Rep], [Health-Ont], NHIN-RFI response, Upper Ontology Summit, Event podcast, Ontologizing the Ontolog Content, Ontology-driven Applications Inventory, [ONION], Database & Ontology, Ontology Measurement & Evaluation, ...
Resides on a virtual collaborative work environment which serves as a dynamic knowledge repository to the community's collective intelligence
We welcome your participation – see:
Questions? talk to any of our 3 co-conveners - PeterYim; LeoObrst & KurtConrad

4. U.S. Economy Depends on NIST Measurements
To make it well, you must be able to control it.
To control it, you must be able to measure it. 4

5. Where NIST is Headed What is our role?
NIST is a metrology institute
NIST is positioning itself in this context to research and provide rigorous and repeatable interoperability and information measurements
Evaluation of ontologies fits well within this mission
A science-based system of measures in information technology
A fundamental gap in science is becoming visible as software becomes a pervasive part of our lives. While the scientific community has developed a strong system of weights, measures and uncertainties to describe the physical world, we have barely begun to understand the units of measure for the information world. What is the unit of measure for how alike or how different two definitions are? And yet this is the key question for successful interoperability. We will not be able to engineer truly reliable, complex software systems until we can quantitatively and repeatably measure their properties. 5

6. The Ontology Measurement & Evaluation Mini series
Chris Welty, IBM – October 19, 2006
Barry Smith, NCOR-Buffalo (tentatively scheduled for December 21, 2006)
Werner Ceusters, NCOR-Buffalo (will be inviting for 2007)
One or two NIST presentations on tools and research
Still open for additional nominations