Review Comment:
The paper is a revised version of an earlier submission, considering most of the comments by the reviewers. Given that, the manuscript has considerably improved since the last submission. As a survey article, the paper is suitable as an introductory text, but the scope of the survey (ontologies for CE of ICT devices) is very narrow, and the content will not be interesting to a large part of the journal's audience. Nevertheless, it shows the complexity of the CE domain, and the need for combining ontologies in many fields, which is a useful observation in itself.
The main weakness of the paper is still the methodology, and consequently the comprehensiveness and reliability of the survey results. Although the methodology description has been improved, I still find it quite vague and not well described. On one hand the methodology applied is extensive, i.e. with many steps, but most of the steps are actually quite unrelated to the survey itself, but rather explains the context of the survey, e.g. how requirements were elicited, and how a decision was made to focus on a certain typ of device. While the steps really relevant for the survey part (4 and 5), and the paper, are glossed over, but saying that a set of keywords were submitted to a set of databases. However, I am missin the information about how many hits were returned, how these were first scanned, what inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, and in what order etc. How many people were involved in the assessment etc. Based on this lack of information it is not clear how reliable the survey is, and if it is comprehensive and unbiased (e.g. with respect to already known work).
I also still strongly suggest that the authors clean up the use of terminology, such as "expressivity" and "expressiveness", which is sometimes used to indicate the level of detail or granularity of modelling, and sometimes refers to language expressivity. For instance, in my opinion it is not correctly used in sections 4.1.6, 4.1.7, 4.1.10. In section 4.1.11 comes an attempt to define the term, but this is too late, and I would rather refrain from using the term rather than redefining its meaning.
I am also quite puzzled by section 4.4, which is supposed to present applications of ontologies - as opposed to papers merely presenting ontologies, in the previous subsections. However, in many of the earlier papers there are also applications presented, and the papers listed under 4.4 seem to also present ontologies - so what is the criteria for this category actually? Why are these ontologies not included in the previous sections? Or the other way around: all applications, also from previously listed papers, presented in this section?
At the end of section 1, ontologies are suddenly called "semantic models", this terms should be introduced explicitly before used here. I assume this is a more generic term, encompassing also what is later called taxonomies and schemas?
Figure 2: The box below step 2 does not really seem to be a task.
Section 3: I think "computational ICT properties" deserves a more detailed definition in the paper. The authors explain it more in the response letter, but it should be in the paper.
Figure 3: what is the notation used here? What do the arrows mean?
In section 4 I would suggest to refrain from repeating any statements by the referenced papers that are not clearly factual. I have not read the paper of 4.1.1, but "scalable framework" is a claim that should be supported by some evidence or a discussion, but is now simply stated in the text.
There are still some occurrences of development tools mentioned in the text, although the authors said they had been removed. For instance this appears in 4.1.4, 4.1.9, 4.2.11
The acronym OWL is introduced in 4.1.7, while it has already been used many times before that.
Some detailed comments and issues:
Throughout the paper, semantic web technologies is used almost as a synonym for ontologies, which I do not agree with. There are many other technologies and standards, in addition to ontologies, that make up the semantic web. Especially in the title of section 4.4 ontologies should be mentioned specifically, and not Semantic Web in general.
I do not really agree with the sentence at the end of page 11 and beginning of page 12, about OWL 2. Since OWL2 is an extension of OWL (1) then if you have an ontology in the previous version of OWL, it is also in OWL2, as far as I remember nothing was removed, i.e. no breaking changes. And OWL 2 was introduced in 2012, so any OWL ontology developed after 2012 (which includes most of the ontologies mentioned in the paper) are bound to be OWL2 compatible, most certainly if it has been created with an OWL 2 compatible tool, e.g. Protégé. So I don't think this is an issue that even needs to be mentioned, unless you start to really investigate the expressivity and OWL profile of the ontologies, which is not the case in the paper. I would also suggest to remove OWL2 and OWL2 DL in Table 3 and simply write OWL in that column, and change the last sentence of 6.2.
The last sentence of 4.2.8 is ambiguous, what is it that is not available online?
As far as I am aware, the ontologies in 4.3.3 are no longer available online, and no longer maintained, hence certainly not under development. This is also repeated in 4.3.5. On a general note: I have not double checked this, but I assume that the authors have actually double checked the availability of all the ontologies claimed to be freely available? Since these problems could otherwise also hold for other ontologies surveyed.
Section 4.3.4, second to last sentence contains a footnote to Excel, which is quite common knowledge, while the second tool has a strangely formulated name (in parenthesis).
What do you mean with "missing domain and range of classes" in the last sentence of page 19? Do you mean properties?
Language issues:
- Abstract: build -> built
- Bottom of page 2: either "results are" or "result is"
- Missing reference and a strange sentence in the last row, application column, of Table 2.
- Section 4.2.2: represented -> represent
- Section 4.2.4: metalic -> metallic, evaluate -> evaluated
- Section 4.2.7: knwoledge -> knowledge
- Section 4.2.9: is has -> has
- Section 6.1: The reuse of specific ontology -> The reuse of a specific ontology, and "ontology's availability" -> "an ontology's availability". Strange word order in the second to last sentence.
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