Using Ontologies

This page collects top-level information about the ontologies we will use. More details are linked in under each heading.

Base Vocabularies

1. Dublin Core : Used via namespace trick at multiple spots

2. Dublin Core Terms: Used via namespace trick at multiple spots

It would be best to concatenate elements used from dc and dct into an individual OWL-DL document which is then imported everywhere whilst the actual vocabularies are never imported.

Base OWL-DL formats

3. FOAF-essential

A SWAN product, slightly hacked by me to be OWL-DL compatible: http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/foaf-essential.owl

There are some issues with foaf:mbox needing solving here.

4. NASA SWEET formats

These are a base. I carefully picked formats so as to be modular, in the notion of an onion like fashion.

http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/sweetSome.owl

SWEET is otherwise too interconnected. I left out ontologies which relied on prior astro, physics, chem, and geo stuff. Specifically, I would have liked to have sciInstrument.owl (which wasnt particularly deep) and spaceCoordinates.owl which imported but didnt use astroPlanet. All Sweet ontologies can be seen here.

Ed Chaya’s ontologies have some Base, observational, and instrumental stuff, but they are not online any more. He reused SWEET where he found appropriate. VSTO defined their own terms, all in one big ontology.

CURRENTLY I have decided not to use SWEET.

This is to keep the number of terms small. In general I want to keep the complexity low, and allow interoperability with other vocabularies by using equivalence ontologies which define mapping layers and are used only in script-like computations, rather than online ones.

5. SKOS-essential

http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/skos-essential.owl

This is not enough for our needs. I am investigating alternatives that allow (a) OrderedCollections and (b) allow representing both Concepts and Collections in Collections.

OWL-DL for existing IVOA SKOS vocabularies

I have transformed AVM and AAKeys to be OWL-DL compatible SKOS and modularized the documents.

6. AVM in SKOS-Essential

http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/AVM.rdf

7. AAKeys in SKOS-Essential

http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/AAkeys.rdf

Agents and Provenance

These also depend on some other SWAN ontologies: Dependencies

Person Names mapping to foaf Reification

Using these we have:

8. SWAN Agents

http://swan.mindinformatics.org/ontologies/1.2/agents.owl

The SWAN folks are willing to make changes we might want to these ontologies to accomodate our needs.

CiTO and BibO

Bibo Article

We’ll use a OWL-DL version if bibo I’ve created for most of our bibliographic needs.

9. BIBO Ontology: Modified for OWL-DL

http://github.com/rahuldave/ontoads/blob/master/owl/bibo.xml.owl

CITO adds a whole parallel set of terms. So does SWAN. We dont need this. We need to extract just that much which uses SWAN provenance and agents to ‘type’ citations.

example

We also want to capture provenance from arxiv or elsewhere to journals, and distinguish various levels of publication such as a conference talk for ADASS, non peer-reviews from an A and A article. We’ll use SWAN pav and agents for these too.

This is where some of the effort in the ADS biblio Ontology will go.

Stock BIBO has Dublin Core redefinition issues, on the line of what is talked about base. We also need to investigate the compatability of BIBO with SWAN agent Person and PersonName usage.

ADS Ontologies