Towards naming conventions for use in controlled vocabulary and ontology engineering

Motivation: For most people, the term "standard" generates an immediate impulse to run in the opposite direction. We all know that this means someone is bent upon the "one, true capitalization style", thereby fomenting an instantaneous rebellion. While it is somewhat audacious to propose standards, the adoption of a few shared simple conventions is an important strategy to improve quality in controlled vocabularies and ontologies we build. Ontologies should not only satisfy computational requirements, but also meet the needs of human readers who are trying to understand them. When confronted by the full complexity of an ontology, logical coherence and predictable naming is important, then our guesses about where something may be found, or what it is called, are right more often than wrong. Conforming to naming conventions in ontology construction will help consumers more readily understand what is intended and avoid the introduction of faults, and it is here where its value lies.