In 2016 when I was a PC chair of the International School for Applied Ontology (ISAO 2016), the idea of organising a contest for the participants turned into a pub quiz somehow. The lecturers provided one or more questions on the topics they’d be teaching and I added a few as well. This set of ISAO16 ontology pub quiz questions is now finally online. It comes with the warning that it is biased toward the topics covered at ISAO 2016, and it turned out that there were a few questions not well formulated and/or not everyone agreed with the answer.
Notwithstanding, it was deemed sufficiently ok as idea in that the general chair of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2017) wanted one for JOWO 2017 as well. Several questions were thrown out of the ISAO16 set for various reasons and more general Ontology questions made their way in, as well as a few ‘fun’ and trivia ones in the hope to add some more entertainment to the ontology pub quiz. The JOWO17 pub quiz question set with answers is now also online to play with, which, in my opinion, is a nicer set than the ISAO16 one. Here are a few questions to give you a taste of it:
- Where/when can a pointless theory be relevant?
- What is the goal of guerrilla ontology?
- No Italian pizza has fruit as topping. Which of the following is (an)/are Italian pizza(s)? Pizza Hawaii, Pizza margherita, Pizza bianca romana (‘white roman pizza’)
- When was the earliest published occurrence of the word “ontology”?
It turned out that it still was not entirely free of debate. If you disagree with one of the answers now, then let me paraphrase Stefano Borgo, who co-ran the JOWO17 pub quiz at the Irish pub in Bolzano on 23 September: maybe there’s something there to write up and submit a paper to FOIS 2018 :-). Or you can write it in the blog post comments section below, so that those questions will/should not be recycled and I can add longer answers to the questions.
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