Review Comment:
The manuscript describes a collaborative and participatory effort to co-design an ontology of attributes of behaviour. This is a welcome contribution as behaviour has been an under-represented domain within the larger scale of ontology efforts. The authors make many very good points about the scope and nature of behaviour as an entity, and about the process of co-designing an ontology through participatory online workshops. I applaud the authors for the work and for the approach that they have taken.
However, while a strength of the paper in general is its description of the ontolgoy development process, this is also its main weakness as a contribution of type 'Ontology description'. Despite the name of the paper, the bulk of the content is about the participatory workshops, their rationale, their process, and qualitative evidence about the experiences of the participants, which experiences are not directly related to the ontology either.
As far as I can tell, only 1-2 pages of the paper are dedicated to the description of the ontology. And this description then lacks many details that would be expected in an ontology description paper. My suggestion to the authors would be to acknowledge that this very nice paper is about the process rather than the outcome (changing the title accordingly), and perhaps create a different but more substantial contribution that is mainly about the ontology itself which then would be suitable as an ontology description article.
Specific comments according to the journal's review criteria are included below.
(1) Quality and relevance of the described ontology (convincing evidence must be provided).
The case for the relevance of the ontology is well made. The ontology includes very useful attributes for the description of behaviour. However, the paper does not include enough detail about the content included in the ontology in order to evaluate its quality. And as far as I can tell, the online OWL upper level file does not include further detail either - there are no annotated definitions etc. for the entities or object properties.
(2) Illustration, clarity and readability of the describing paper, which shall convey to the reader the key aspects of the described ontology.
The paper reads well, given that its main topic is the process followed in the ontology development. The description of the ontology is however too short and not well developed, and mainly exposed via a Protege screenshot.
Please also assess the data file provided by the authors under “Long-term stable URL for resources”. In particular, assess
(A) whether the data file is well organized and in particular contains a README file which makes it easy for you to assess the data,
The ontology is hosted in a GitHub repository, there is a README.
(B) whether the provided resources appear to be complete for replication of experiments, and if not, why,
N/A
(C) whether the chosen repository, if it is not GitHub, Figshare or Zenodo, is appropriate for long-term repository discoverability, and
Yes, GitHub is a suitable location.
(4) whether the provided data artifacts are complete.
The data artifacts appear to be complete as per what is described in the paper. However, they lack detail that I would expect in a fully developed ontology, which is also acknowledged through metadata and comments in the OWL files pointing to the preliminary nature of the resource.
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