Criteria for including topics in the Semantic Web Topic Hierarchy

This page describes a first set of criteria which guides our decisions to include a topic or not include a topic into the Semantic Web Topic Hierarchy (SWTH). Of course, these decisions were still subjective and depending on the involved persons and their research interests as always when creating taxonomies / ontologies...

In general, each topic has to have sufficient relevance for the Semantic Web community. This means that even very important topics from other communities might not be included if they (at the moment) touch the work of the Semantic Web community only slightly. Mainly we are rather reluctant to add topics to limit the size of the SWTH and make it useful for as many people in the Semantic Web community as possible.

Some (shallow) criteria for adding topics were:

• More than xK hits in google when you search for the phrase (to show that the topic is popular at all;)
• Used as session title in major Semantic Web Conferences (that's where we actually started from)
• Separate Semantic Web workshops about this topic
• Many publications about this topic (cf. [Google Scholar] or [FacetedDBLP] ) at Semantic Web conferences. Checkout the following [query for all ISWC / ESWC / ASWC publication].

For some of the already existing topics, these criteria do not hold, but since removing topics might interfer with people already using existing versions of the hierarchy, we are very careful in removing topics.