Towards Social Performance Indicators for Community-based Ontology Evolution

The “living” ontologies that will furnish the Semantic Web are lacking. The problem is that in ontology engineering practice, the underlying methodological and organisational principles to involve the community are mostly ignored. Each of the involved activities in the community-based ontology evolution methodology require certain skills and tools which domain experts usually lack. Finding a social arrangement of roles and responsibilities that must supervise the consistent implementation of methods and tools is a wicked problem. Based on three technology-independent problem dimensions of ontology construction, we propose a set of social performance indicators (SPIs) to bring insights in the social arrangement evolving the ontology, and how it should be adapted to the changing needs of the community. We illustrate the SPIs on data from a realistic experiment in the domain of competency-centric HRM.