Proposed guidelines for publishing ontology papers

The discipline of Applied Ontology is facing several challenges. Some of these challenges concern ontologies themselves, for instance the ability to appropriately and exhaustively represent certain domains, or to correctly and efficiently perform reasoning; others are more tied to their use, for example how they are used in applications and with which benefits, or whether and how it is possible to align them with other existing ontologies. What seems evident is that, in order to be widely and profitably used, they should demonstrate a high quality level and this is unfortunately not always the case. All of this is reflected in our experience with the Journal. Many papers are submitted on domainspecific ontologies, but few are accepted because they are not meeting quality standards. Very rarely the ontologies they present are aligned or even inspired by upper level ontologies and, worse, quite often the presentation of the ontology consists solely of a collection of Protégé screenshots. The ontology has a poor axiomatization, and even if axioms are presented, we find mere translation of them into natural language, without justification or explanation. The papers contain at best a shallow analysis of the ontology, without a substantial foundation in underlying theories or formal techniques and without a sound motivation of the adopted modeling choices. Finally, there is no comparison with similar/alternative approaches in the same domain of application. As a consequence, any possibility of exchanging information with systems based on different ontologies of the same domain is precluded from the start. More broadly, these problems draw attention to general questions the community should try and address. How do we measure progress in Applied Ontology? What is considered an advancement in the field? What are we doing as a community, and what role does the Journal play? We would like this editorial to initiate such a discussion.