Conceptual Model

Presentation of our conceptual model as a table. We answered the theoretical model questions finding their relative properties in existing ontologies.

Person

As we pointed out in the theoretical model, our aim was to describe people related to our items. The first ontologies that we analysed for this purpose were: - DC and DCT, for being simple, generic and widely used in different domains - FOAF, made to describe people as entities inside the Web - EAC-CPF Ontology, since it was created to describe individuals, families and corporate bodies that create, preserve, use and are responsible for and/or associated with records in a variety of ways Actually, some properties were not adequately covered by these ontologies, so we looked for others like: - Core Concepts Ontology, a fairly generic ontology used by BBC, which we used to express birth and death information - BIBFRAME, the new Linked Data format thought to be the new international standard for libraries to overcome MARC. To sum up, we provided basic information mainly using FOAF, while to depict the person’s relationship with an item and at least another person we used EAC-CPF (precisely <eac-cpf:resourceRelation>). In this “description block” we also used some DC subfields to deepen the relationships descriptions. Finally, we used Core Concepts Ontology for the birth and death info, BIBFRAME for the spoken languages and again EAC-CPF for a brief biography. Unfortunately, we were not able to find a property to define one's religion.

Question Subject Property Subproperty
What is the entity? entity rdf:type
What is the name? entity foaf:name
What is an alternative name or alias? entity foaf:name
What is the gender? entity foaf:gender
What is the birth date? entity core:dateOfBirth
What is the birth place? entity core:placeOfBirth
What is the death date? entity core:dateOfDeath
What is the death place? entity core:placeOfDeath
What is the spoken language? entity bf:language
What is the relation with another person? entity eac-cpf:resourceRelation
Which type of relation? eac-cpf:resourceRelationType
What is the description of the relation? dc:description
What is the object of the relation? dcterms:relation
When the relation started? dc:date
What is the relation with a particular resource? entity eac-cpf:resourceRelation
Which type of relation? eac-cpf:resourceRelationType
What is the description of the relation? dc:description
What is the object of the relation? dcterms:relation
When the relation started? dc:date
What about the biographical history? entity eac-cpf:biogHist
What is the occupation of the person? entity eac-cpf:occupation
What is a topic of interest for the person? entity foaf:interest
What is a related resource in which this entity is physically or logically included? entity dcterms:ispartOf
Which resources refer to the same entity? entity owl:sameAs
Which resources have this entity as primary topic? entity foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
Which other resources are related to the same entity? entity skos:related

Place

We went straight using GeoNames Ontology, which is the Semantic Web integration of the GeoNames database for adding geospatial semantic information to the WWW. For the latitude and longitude coordinates, we followed the suggestion of W3C to use Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary. Unfortunately, we were not able to find a property to define the name of the place in a certain date.

Question Subject Property Subproperty
What is the entity? entity rdf:type
What is the name? entity gn:name
What is an alternative name? entity gn:alternativeName
In which country is the place located? entity gn:countryCode
At which latitude is the place located? entity wgs84_pos:lat
At which latitude is the place located? entity wgs84_pos:long
Which resources refer to the same entity? entity owl:sameAs
Which resources os different from this entity? entity owl:differentFrom
Which resources have an associative relation with this entity? entity skos:related
Which resources have a hierarchical relation with this entity? entity skos:broader
Which resources have a hierarchical relation with this entity? entity skos:narrower

Date

We encoded dates using ISO 8601 (the International Standard for the representation of dates and times) in the format Complete Date: YYYY-MM-DD. To add more information, we decided to reuse EAC-CPF Ontology, precisely the <eac-cpf:resourceRelation> block that we already used in the person’s description to again define a specific date relation to a resource (which was, in our case, already part of the collection). Finally, we used CIDOC CRM (a formal domain ontology for cultural heritage information) to describe the date as part of an historical period.

Question Subject Property Subproperty
What is the entity? entity rdf:type
What is the relation with a particular resource? entity eac-cpf:resourceRelation
Which type of relation? eac-cpf:resourceRelationType
What is the description of the relation? dc:description
What is the object of the relation? dcterms:relation
In which period falls this date? entity crm:P10_falls_within
Which resources have the date as primary topic? entity foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf

Concept/Subject

We used a combination of RDF, RDFS and DC to describe the concept extracted from our resource, while to underline the spatial and temporal coverage we adopted DC Terms. Finally, as for the date, we added a CIDOC CRM property to encode the historical period where the concept is contained.

Question Subject Property Subproperty
What is the entity? entity rdf:type
What is the topic of the resource? entity dc:subject
What is the label of the resource? entity rdfs:label
What is a brief description of the resource? entity dc:description
What is a spatial relation with the concept? entity dcterms:spatial
What is a temporal relation with the concept? entity dcterms:temporal
In which period falls this concept? entity crm:P10_falls_within
Which resources refer to the same entity? entity owl:sameAs
Which resources os different from this entity? entity owl:differentFrom
Which resources have a hierarchical relation with this entity? entity skos:broader
Which resources have a hierarchical relation with this entity? entity skos:narrower
What are other useful references for the resource? entity rdfs:seeAlso