Image BioInformatics Research Group

Department of Zoology

University of Oxford, UK

http:/ibrg.zoo.ox.ac.uk

PRO and PSO, the PublishingRoles and Statuses Ontologies

© David Shotton, 2012 Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Licence

e-mail: david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk

David Shotton and Silvio Peroni

The requirement – time-constrained relationships

‘Editor’ is a role in the relationship between a person and a document

‘Under review’ is a possible status of a document in the publishing workflow 

Such roles and statuses may hold only during a defined period of time, and may also be contingent on events controlled by agents – such as the editor sending the document to a reviewer

We need a generic straightforward way to encode such time-constrained roles and statuses in RDF

The problem – such encoding is not trivial in RDF

Because of the sheer simplicity of the subject-predicate-object triple, OWL ontologies and RDF-based models are not able to handle qualifications such as time periods and contexts directly

Instead we need a workaround such as reification or, more generally, an n-ary description

Ontological patterns have been developed to address this issue

For example, by using the time-indexed situation pattern

(http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/timeindexedsituation.owl),

it becomes possible to link a subject to a time-dependent situation

Encoding Publishing Roles

We have previously used this time-indexed situation pattern to create

PRO, the Publishing Roles Ontology (http://purl.org/spar/pro/)

PRO permit roles of people (e.g. editor, reviewer) to be encoded for specific periods of time, and in relationship to particular organizations or documents

Diagrammatic representation of PRO

Encoding Publishing Roles

:shotton a foaf:Person

; pro:holdsRoleInTime [ a pro:RoleInTime

; pro:withRole pro:author

; pro:relatesToDocument :adventures-in-semantic-publishing ] .

If we look just at the core of this ontology, we see that this ontology pattern has two important advantages:

First, it relates the subject directly to its role in time

Second, it permits new roles to be specified simply by adding new individuals as members of the class pro:Role, without having to modify the ontology

This is much simpler that having to add a new ‘relationship’ class for each new role

Diagrammatic representation of PSO

We have similarly used this time-indexed situation pattern to create

PSO, the Publishing Status Ontology (http://purl.org/spar/pso/)

.

Encoding Publishing Statuses

Here, a document status, such as being under review, can be associated with an event related to an agent, for example the event of sending the paper to a reviewer by an editor, and with a particular timespan of the reviewing process

:adventures-in-semantic-publishing a foaf:Document

; pso:holdsStatusInTime [ a pso:StatusInTime

; pso:withStatus pso:under-review

; pso:isAcquiredAsAConsequenceOf [ a part:Event

; rdfs:label “The sending of the paper to a reviewer”

; part:hasParticipant [ a pso:Agent

; pro:holdsRoleInTime [ a pro:RoleInTime

; pro:withRole pro:editor

; pro:relatesToDocument :adventures-in-semantic-publishing ] ]

; tisit:atTime [ a ti:TimeInterval

; ti:hasIntervalStartDate

“2008-01-13T00:00:00”xsd:dateTime

; ti:hasIntervalEndDate

“2009-03-09T00:00:00”xsd:dateTime ] ] .

CERRO, the CERIF Roles and Relationships Ontology

CERIF is the Common European Research Information Framework

As a contribution to CERIF, we have now used exactly this same ontology design pattern to create CERRO, the CERIF Roles and Relationships Ontology

CERRO is available at http://purl.org/cerif/cerro

CERRO complements and extends the draft CERIF and SEMCERIF ontologies developed by the Linked Data Task Group of euroCRIS

We have proposed the adoption of CERRO in a document available at http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/pub/2012/cerif/Shotton-Peroni_Proposal-for-CERRO-the-CERIF-Relationships-Ontology.docx

Diagrammatic representation of CERRO CERRO

CERRO Roles, and using roles as object properties

CERRO contains 69 relationships, for example

cerro:author - with respect to a paper, a publisher, etc.

cerro:data-manager - with respect to a project, a dataset, etc.

cerro:principal investigator - with respect to a project, an institution, etc.

CERRO used the OWL 2 DL capabilities for meta-modelling (known as OWL punning)

This permits the individuals of a class cerro:Relationship also to be represented as object properties in the CERRO ontology

This has the advantage that

if one does not need to employ cerro:RelationshipInTime in order to specify temporal constraints on a relationship

the relationship can be used directly as an object property to relate the subject to the object

Examples of CERRO usage

:shotton a cerif:Person

; cerro:holdsRelationshipInTime [ a cerro:RelationshipInTime

; cerro:withRelationship cerro:principal-investigator

; cerro:linksToObjectEntity [ a cerif:Project

; dcterms:title “The Open Citation Project”

; foaf:homePage <http://opencitations.net> ]

; tisit:atTime [ a ti:TimeInterval

; ti:hasIntervalStartDate

“2010-06-16T00:00:00”xsd:dateTime

; ti:hasIntervalEndDate

“2011-06-16T00:00:00”xsd:dateTime ] ] .

Clear, direct and unambiguous

:shotton a cerif:Person

; cerro:principal-investigator [ a cerif:Project

; foaf:homePage <http://opencitations.net> ] .

Advantages of using CERRO

The time-indexed relationship is associated directly with a cerif:CoreEntity

The time-indexed relationship is held directly with respect to another cerif:Entity

The starting and ending times refer directly to the cerro:RelationshipInTime

There is no need to specify a new additional indirect ‘linking’ URI for each pair of entities to be linked, with which URI the times are associated

There is no need to specify many different link properties, one for each type of relationship, e.g. cerif:isLinkedByPerson, cerif:isLinkedToProject

A new relationship can easily be specified by adding a new individual to the class cerro:Relationship, without having to change the structure of the ontology

CERRO is complete, published on SourceForge, open source and ready to use

All classes and properties are fully defined and appropriately restricted

The ontology is written in validated OWL 2 DL

CERRO is designed to be used with the draft CERIF and SEMCERIF ontologies