In this paper we give an account of the current state of practice in ontology engineering based on the findings of a six months empirical survey we performed between October 2008 and March 2009 that analysed 148 ontology engineering projects from industry and academia. The survey focused on process-related issues and looked into the impact of research achievements on real-world ontology engineering projects, the complexity of particular ontology development tasks, the level of tool support, and the usage scenarios for ontologies. The main contributions of this survey compared to other works in the ontology engineering community are twofold: Firstly, the size of the data set the results are grounded on is by far larger than every other similar endeavour published in the last years. Secondly, the findings of the survey confirm the fact that ontology engineering is an established engineering discipline in respect of the maturity and level of acceptance of its main components, methodologies, methods and software tools, whereas further research should target the customization of existing technology to the specifics of vertical domains, as well as economic aspects of ontology engineering.

It is undoubtedly true that social media such as Facebook and Twitter are influencing the ways in which politicians engage the public, no longer hostage to the gatekeeping proclivities of traditional media, but now able to broadcast their messages to anyone who wants to hear them. On the public's side, we can now follow politicians who are on Twitter or have a Facebook fan page, comment on their tweets and posts, and send them messages directly. So far, so democratic. But how many of us actually do more than just read posts and tweets and how many politicians do more than just inform us about their activities? Crucially, do politicians use social media in ways that enhance opportunities for dialogue between them and us? To explore these questions further in relation to politicians' Facebook behaviours, we interviewed New Zealand Members of Parliament about their motivations for using social media and their attitudes on such media's effectiveness as a political communication tool in the context of a general election campaign. Our findings suggest that despite their talk of citizen engagement, most politicians use social media as means of distributing information (one-way flow) and to make themselves both visible and 'hip' to the public. While cautiously optimistic about the role of social media in the lives of citizens, Members of Parliament also suggest that social media must be complementary to, and thus incorporated in, a broad-based communications strategy, rather than be seen as a replacement for traditional campaign activities.

Abstract. The technical challenges associated with the development and deployment of ontologies have been subject to a number of research initiatives since the beginning of the nineties. By comparison the economics of ontology engineering remains a poorly exploited field, this underdevelopment having an impact on the adoption of ontology-driven technologies beyond the boundaries of the academic community. The work presented in this paper aims at the alleviation of this situation. We introduce a method for measuring the benefits of ontologies based on a multiple gap model for user information satisfaction analysis. Together with cost models such as ONTOCOM, it can be used to give an account of the economic value of ontologies.

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