Ten years of Applied Ontology

This double issue of Applied Ontology celebrates the conclusion of the journal’s tenth anniversary year. At a time when information technology of all kinds depends on the use of explicit ontologies, our journal addresses the modeling issues that underlie the next generation of computational systems. As the editors of Applied Ontology, we are excited by how far we have come in the past decade and by the opportunities that await our research community.

Earlier this year, we anticipated the publication of this special issue, and we invited contributions to help us document the current state of research in applied ontology and the range of challenges that the community is now addressing (Guarino & Musen, 2015). Included in this issue are two peer-reviewed papers (selected from the 7 that we received), that review the state of the art in the fields of ontology modularization (Khan & Keet, 2015) and conceptual modeling (Verdonck et al., 2015). IOS Press has awarded the authors of both these papers a prize in recognition of their contribution to this special issue.

This issue also contains eight position papers (selected from the 18 that we received) that have been submitted by authors who represent a wide cross-section of the applied ontology community. These papers help to document contemporary thought in our discipline. Although each of these papers received peer review, these submissions often offer opinions and perspectives that necessarily represent the authors’ particular points of view. We believe that such position papers help to clarify ideas, to promote debate, and, ultimately, to advance our field. We look forward to publishing more papers in this style in future issues of the journal.

We also are pleased to include in this issue the 2015 Ontology Summit communiqué (Underwood et al., 2015). Each year, the Ontology Summit brings together ontology experts from academia, government, and industry to discuss a topic of current relevance online over the course of several months, culminating in a face-to-face meeting. This year, the focus was on ontologies for the Internet of Things.

Finally, this double issue also includes a regular paper by Mizoguchi and his colleagues (2015), which offers a new theory that accounts for families of roles that may be difficult to distinguish without careful attention to their temporal properties.

We are delighted to be able to include such distinctive content in this commemoration of the tenth anniversary of our journal. The articles and position papers in this special issue of Applied Ontology demonstrate that our community is broad and interdisciplinary. They also help to chart the way for the future of our field, and they make us eagerly anticipate the next ten years of advances in our discipline.