Self descriptiveness of RDF data

Self-Descriptiveness of Ontologies

Fariz Darari

A Good Ontology Must Be Self-Descriptive!

When someone uses a term from the ontology, she must be able to find out the real meaning of the term by following/dereferencing its URI.

Example:

<http://example.org/thisDocument>

<http://purl.org/dc/terms/license>

<http://example.org/cc-by>

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The example showed that this document’s license is CC-BY.

The example uses the term license from the Dublin Core ontology, meaning:

“A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource.”

Oh yeah?

For sure, because when I dereferenced the URI: http://purl.org/dc/terms/license

I got exactly this description:

PS: Yes, DC ontology is a good one :)

OK, I believe you now!

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What about the other ontologies?

• FOAF

• OWL

• dbpprop (DBpedia)

• geo

• BIBO (Books)

• VoID (Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets)

FOAF

Example term: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows

Dereference result:

OWL

Example term: http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#equivalentClass

Dereference result:

dbpprop

Example term: http://dbpedia.org/property/country

Dereference result:

geo

Example term: http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#latitude

Dereference result:

BIBO

Example term:

http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/chapter

Dereference result:

VoID Example term:

http://vocab.deri.ie/void#Dataset

Dereference result: