Theoretical analysis and propositions for "ontology citation"

Ontology citation, the practice of referring the ontology in a similar fashion the scientific community routinely follows in providing the bibliographic references to other scholarly works, has not received enough attention it supposed to. Interestingly, so far none of the existing standard citation styles (e.g., APA, CMOS, and IEEE) have included ontology as a citable information source in the list of citable information sources such as journal article, book, website, etc. Also, not much work can be found in the literature on this topic though there are various issues and aspects of it that demand a thorough study. For instance, what to cite? Is it the publication that describes the ontology, or the ontology itself? The citation format, style, illustration of motivations of ontology citation, the citation principles, ontology impact factor, citation analysis, and so forth. In this work, we primarily analyse the current ontology citation practices and the related issues. We illustrate the various motivations and the basic principles of ontology citation. We also propose a template for referring the source of ontologies.