Blogs

We’re very pleased to announce that Andy Seaborne has joined Epimorphics as a Senior Architect.

Andy is an expert on the storage and query of RDF data. He created the storage subsystems TDB and SDB for Jena. He was the co-editor of the original version of the SPARQL query language specification, and is now co-editor of the query language specification for SPARQL1.1. He continues on the SPARQL working group as an invited expert.

The next steps in developing our ontology involve one more set of changes (linking to OPMV) and, most importantly, publishing the ontology somewhere.

These aren't the "final" steps as far as the ontology is concerned, it will need to evolve as people gain experiences applying it and give feedback on design and naming issues. However, it does bring this series of blog postings to a good stopping point.

This is the third in our series of posts recording the (currently ongoing) process of developing an organization ontology. Here we sketch an initial design. Taking the initial requirements we now look at each part of the domain scope and identify the core classes, properties and design patterns.

This sketch is designed to cover all of the requirements with a minimum core set of concepts. The intention is that particular applications would extend and specialize this core. The next step is to get feedback on both the structure and the naming and associated definitions.

Background

The data.gov.uk linked data project found itself in need on an ontology or vocabulary to support linked data publishing of government organizational information. A check for existing ontologies didn't turn up an ideal solution so we decided to develop one.

Statistical publications generally include at least one dimension comprised of the time intervals over which data has been aggregated. Linked data vocabularies for representing statistical information, such as SCOVO and current SDMX/Linked-Data collaborative activities refer to time intervals as 'things' or 'objects' rather than as literal values. This will typically involves the assignment of a URI so that multiple references can be made to the same interval.