The Survey Ontology: Packaging Survey Research as Research Objects

Surveys are a common and well explored method to collect information from people. Still, the sharing and reuse of survey data present several challenges for survey researchers that need to be supported in packaging and harmonising different resources describing a survey study. In this paper, we present the Survey Ontology that we designed to empower our CONEY toolkit for conversational surveys. Leveraging on Semantic Web technologies we aimed at building a solution to semantically annotate questions and answers at design time, and to easily elaborate and inter-link the collected data at analysis time. The Survey Ontology embraces the research object principles, and defines an open vocabulary to represent, annotate, and share a representation of the questionnaire structure and the gathered responses of a survey. We complement the discussion describing a complete survey research study carried out with CONEY and openly published as a research object.

Paper available at: https://doi.org/10.4126/FRL01-006429412