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 |