vim: Research on OWL-Based Vocabulary Ontology Construction Method for Units of Measurement

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

A peer-reviewed scientific manuscript on a new ontology of units of measurement called “vim” is interesting. The discussed topics are of importance for the development of digital metrology. Here are some questions for the authors of the manuscript to better understand their work and its implications:

1.      How did the authors rate the quality and usability of the “vim” ontology? Have you conducted any tests or experiments to check the correctness, consistency and interoperability of the “vim” ontology with other systems or applications?

2.      Have the authors compared the “vim” ontology with other existing measurement ontologies like OM5 or QUADT6?

3.      What are the main advantages and limitations of the “vim” ontology? Is the “vim” ontology versatile and flexible enough to handle different measurement domains and scenarios?

4.      Is the “vim” ontology easy to maintain and update to keep up with changes in metrology?

5.      What are the potential applications and impact of the “vim” ontology on metrology practice?

6.      Can the “vim” ontology support the automation, integration and exchange of measurement data between different entities and platforms? Can the “vim” ontology contribute to improving the quality and reliability of measurements and to solving metrological problems?

7.      How does the "vim" ontology ensure consistency and interoperability with international unit standards, and what specific standards were used as a basis for its development?

8.      Can the authors provide more details on the experimental results of the "vim" ontology, particularly in terms of its ability to accurately convert units and handle contextual differences in ontological descriptions?

9.      How do the authors  envision the "vim" ontology being used in practice, and what potential benefits do you see for its application in the digital representation of units in China and beyond? Does this solution only contribute to the development of the Chinese-speaking community?

10.   How do the authors envision further development of the "vim" ontology, and how do you see it evolving to address new challenges and applications in the field of metrology?

11. Given the recent advancements in natural language processing and code interpretation (e.g. ChatGPT-4 with experimental Code Interpreter plugin), what is the rationale for developing a formal ontology like "vim" for digital representation of units, and how do the authors see it complementing or competing with emerging technologies in this field?

 

 

Quality of English language allows you to understand the text and it is easy to read.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, this is a promising study reporting a novel result. The subject is undoubtedly an important one, as the lack of support for international standards in languages other than English is a barrier to scientific and technological development. Moreover, the emphasis on machine-readability is key, as automation of data processing and interpretation is the only way to make large-scale analysis of "big data" feasible. For these reasons, I agree with the authors that this project is worthwhile.

That said, I think there needs to be more description of what was actually done in this paper. The introduction and earlier sections of the methods make it seem as though a complete or nearly-complete solution has been developed, whereas the sections about validation and application make it clear this ontology is still at the prototype or proof-of-concept stage. It might help if a paragraph or two that summed up the entire procedure undertaken in the paper were placed at the end of the introduction, including a mention of the software used to build the ontology (Protege).

Finally, I was disappointed to see that no supporting data or code are publicly shared. Even if the complete vim ontology is not yet ready for sharing, at the least it would be nice if some of the python scripts were shared to give others the opportunity to replicate the validations and perhaps even provide useful feedback that would help the authors move forward faster.

Some line-specific comments follow:

Line 95: The claim that this paper "evaluates" the alternative ontology construction frameworks is not true. They are not considered after this line. Instead, the authors chose to use Seven Steps. This is fine, but there could be more justification of why this framework is advantageous over the methods the authors say are more applicable to enterprise deployments. A reference to another case where Seven Steps is used to build an ontology that has parallels with this one could help.

Line 151: It would be worthwhile to enumerate the standards used to build the content of the ontology. Is there room to put them all in a table? If not, can the list be given as supplementary information?

Line 157: "quantities are collections of quantities" This is either tautological or recursive, but in any event, it does not make sense. Please clarify what collections of quantities refers to, and as this phrase appears in modified form elsewhere in the paper, correct it there as well.

Line 189-193: This section on dimensionless quantities also does not make sense. There appears to be at least one incomplete sentence, so perhaps this paragraph was remixed and did not come out as intended. Revise to explain dimensionless quantities better.

As the numbering appears to have restarted, line 25 on page 9: The Protege software will not be familiar to much of your audience. At minimum a reference to the software homepage is needed, but it would also help to add a phrase explaining what Protege is and what it does. For example, "Protege (v. 5.5.0), an open-source ontology editor, was used to run vim..." Ideally you would mention Protege earlier in the paper, perhaps at the end of the introduction or in the methods section where creating the ontology is discussed.

Line 60: It was not clear without additional context that the Pellet inference engine is part of Protege. The reader should not have to look this up on the fly.

Line 80: The URL for the dataset should be changed to an in-text reference and cited appropriately. Also, this section could be more detailed about how vim and the conversion rules were applied to this data. Compared to the earlier methods and results, this section is general and vague. The code from this specific analysis would be a good candidate for public sharing.

Line 87: How exactly does it avoid confusion of concepts and inconsistent data? This is why additional information in this section would be useful.

Line 130: Given the innovative and potentially transformative nature of this project, the final section seems abrupt and again overly general regarding lessons learned and next steps. If the ontology is incomplete, what is the next most logical portion to build out? Are there any alternatives to manual knowledge extraction that could be employed to progress faster? Are there other specialties or bodies of knowledge that tie in with this project and should take notice of it? This last paragraph seems like a missed opportunity to present a roadmap for eventual deployment of vim.

There are no serious problems with the English in this paper, but in a few cases there are repeats where it looks like a clause or section has been copy/pasted but the duplication was not resolved. An example would be line 57's paragraph repeated almost exactly at line 69. This needs to be corrected. There are a few other sections where the clarity of the language could be improved, but this is not as urgent a fix as the repeats.

Also, while not a language-specific problem, another copyediting problem I spotted is out-of-sequence or otherwise incorrect reference numbering. Check the references again and regenerate the bibliography if needed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper discusses the need for digitizing units of measurement in the digital era and highlights the importance of a bilingual unit ontology for achieving this goal. A bilingual unit ontology, named vim, is developed using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Seven Steps to Ontology Development approach.

Major questions, comments, and remarks:

1. I think that the use of the name JJF 1001-2011 alone is difficult to understand, especially in the abstract.

2. Figures 1, 2, and 3 should be provided in more readable form (e.g., in a vector format).

3. "The importance of unit ontologies has also been recognized by the W3C47
Semantic Web Best Practices and Development (SWBPD) working group.": Without a proper reference, this sentence makes little sense.

4. A short piece on methodologies for creating an ontology is definitely not enough. It's worth devoting at least a subsection to it. Describe there more details, e.g. which steps from which methodology were taken to create the ontology. Why these steps?

5. Figure 5 is meaningless. What is it supposed to show? What is in the screenshot is standard output in Python and rdflib.

Minor comments:

1. [10][11][12].Quantities -> [10][11][12]. Quantities

2. When the authors first mention Resource Description Framework (RDF), Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS), and Web Ontology Language (OWL) references should appear.

3. Resource Deion Framework Schema -> Resource Description Framework Schema

4. Table 4: Why do some properties have a range equal xsd:anyURI? It seems more natural to use rdfs:Resource.

5.  Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) should have a reference.

 

I cannot accept the fact that the ontology mentioned has not been provided in electronic form. I believe it is an integral part of the paper, so at least a link to it should be provided (and even better, the repository and DOI, e.g., from Zenodo).

There are quite a few grammatical and punctuation errors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I think that the author has sufficiently modified the paper to address my concerns. Therefore, I'm okay to accept the paper.