Ontology Users' Survey - Summary of Results

This report describes initial findings from the Ontology Users’ Survey conducted in early 2013. The next six sections follow the structure of the survey, providing information about the respondents; their ontologies; their ontology tools; the ontology languages and language features they use; the use of ontology patterns; and their final general comments.

These responses were obtained by using a number of contacts and relevant mailing lists. The latter included:

- ontolog-forum (ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net)

- UK Ontology Network (ontology-uk@googlegroups.com)

- two LinkedIn groups: Semantic Web for Life Sciences; Description Logic

- lists maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation: okfn-en@lists.okfn.org; ok-scotland@lists.okfn.org; okfn-nl@lists.okfn.org

- the internal mailing list within the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University

In all, there were 118 respondents. A number of respondents only answered a subset of the questions; most questions resulted in several tens of responses. No attempt was made to achieve a representative sampling of all ontology users, and this should be borne in mind when interpreting the results.