Status of This Document
The template of this specification is derived from the FOAF Vocabulary Specification, which was
created by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, and the
Music Ontology Specification, which was created by Yves Raimond. It was modified and extended by Bob
Ferris. Furthermore, a modified and extended version of Danbri's SpecGen version
was used to generate most of the RDFa statements of the Info Service Ontology for this specification (see here for SpecGen version 6 by Bob Ferris).
This document is created by combining the RDFS/OWL machine-readable
Info Service Ontology with a human-readable HTML representation that includes RDFa annotations. Future versions may
incorporate multilingual translations of term definitions. The RDF/XML version of the specification is also available
directly from the namespace URI. RDF/N3 representations could be access via the links above.
The authors welcome comments on this document, preferably via the Info Service Ontology Specification Group mailing list or the
Info Service Ontology blog.
Table of Contents
The Info Service Ontology at a glance
The is:InfoService concept as graph with relations:
An a-z index of Info Service Ontology terms, by class (categories or types) and by property.
Example
RDF/Turtle representation of a webpage linked to an Information Service:
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix is: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/core#> .
@prefix isi: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/inst/> .
isi:musicbrainz a is:InfoService .
<http://musicbrainz.org/artist/8a1fe33d-6029-462e-bcb7-08e0ebaba6dd.html>
a foaf:Document ;
is:info_service isi:musicbrainz .
The initial intention behind designing this ontology was to add some knowledge re. linked websites
from different information services, e.g.
Wikipedia or MusicBrainz, in semantic graphs
(as proposed in the FOAF wiki). This is shown in the example above for
a document taken from MusicBrainz.
A graphic of MusicBrainz modelled as Information Service:
RDF/Turtle representation of MusicBrainz modelled as Information Service (see also RDF and N3 for downloadable representations of this example):
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix is: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/core#> .
@prefix ist: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/types/> .
@prefix isct: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/ctypes/> .
@prefix isq: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/quality/> .
@prefix isi: <http://purl.org/ontology/is/inst/> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
isi:musicbrainz
rdf:type is:InfoService ;
rdfs:isDefinedBy isi: ;
dc:description "An open content music database. Modelled here as information service."@en ;
dc:title "MusicBrainz"^^xsd:string ;
dcterms:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Metadata_registry> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Acoustic_fingerprinting> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:MusicBrainz> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Library_2.0> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Online_encyclopedias> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Online_music_and_lyrics_databases> ,
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Free_websites> ;
is:info_service_contributor_type
isct:mixed ;
is:info_service_quality
isq:good ;
is:info_service_type
ist:encyclopedia , ist:knowledge_base ;
is:main_subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Music> ;
foaf:homepage <http://musicbrainz.org/> .
This is an is:InfoService individual for MusicBrainz as proof-of-concept example. Therefore,
I used also some category definitions from DBpedia (important
is also the property is:main_subject for associating a main subject of an Information Service).
Introduction: Info Service Ontology Basics
Info Service Ontology Namespaces, Domains and Prefixes
For representing the different issues of the Info Service Ontology, it was necessary to assign several namespaces/domains, which are the following ones:
Please use them as intended ;)
What's the Info Service Ontology for?
TODO
Background
What is an Information Service?
A very simple definition is:
An Information Service is a service, which provides (serves) data/knowledge/information somehow.
However, this definition is not strong enough to describe the range and domain of an Information Service. Therefore, it is necessary to define the term Information
Service in a specific context. Fortunately, Wikipedia delivers, or better saying serves, a good definition
of this context, which is called Information System.
An Information System is any combination of information technology and people's activities using that technology
to support operations, management, and decision-making.
The definition continues with explaining the term from a bit more technical view:
In a very broad sense, the term Information System is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, algorithmic processes,
data and technology.
Regarding the first part of this definition, an Information Service is an instance of Information Technology. Hence, an Information Service is a part of
an Information System. The second role in this definition is people. This term must be substituted by the term agent, which could be an administrator
and/or an user. An user could be a customer and/or contributor. In addition, an agent could be a human or a machine.
The interaction is that an Information Service, which collects (retrieves), manages (structures) and stores the data/knowledge/information
(maybe with the help of an administrator), serves this data/knowledge/information to an user.
The outcome of this, is the following definition:
An Information Service is this part of an Information System that serves data/knowledge/information* to
customers and collects it from its contributors, to manage and store it by optionally using
administrators.
This should be a technology independent** definition of the term Information Service. That means an Information Service could be
- an encyclopedia (
- domain specific, e.g.
, or
- domain independent, e.g.
),
- a social network service (
- domain specific, e.g.
, or
- domain independent, e.g.
),
- a recommender system (e.g.
),
- a library, which stores books etc., or
- a book, which stores its knowledge in each page
- a blog,
- a human, which stores his/her own knowledge in his/her brain,
independently of its representation form and/or carrier/transmission medium/form, e.g. a book (paper) or the Internet.
Although, the term Information Service could cover a broad range of things, the usage of it might
concentrates for the beginning on the Internet and there
especially on the Web, with a focus on Information
Services, which have/deliver a huge amount of data/knowledge/information (of a specific domain or domain independent)****.
Hence, one could say: "let's define the term Web Information Service as a subset and a specific kind of Information
Service" (cf. definition of Web Information
System). However, since the Web delivers only another kind of carrier/transmission medium/form, it should be
enough to say that an Information Service simply uses this carrier/transmission medium/form next to other carrier/transmission
mediums/forms.
PS: This definition is based on the community/expert power of Wikipedia and a
good discussion with Olaf Hartig.
*) knowledge is all meaning of data, and information is a subset of
knowledge to a concrete question or domain (see Information
definition on Wikipedia).
**) That means, it includes non-computer (sometimes also referred as offline***) related things, e.g. a book or a library,
and computer (sometimes also referred as online***) related things, e.g. a website.
***) Although, the terms offline and online should be in general used for computer related things. They express
whether data/knowledge/information is available via Internet (online) or not (offline).
****) However, the society tends more and more into the Long Tail. Hence,
it might be interesting to describe and rate also all these very subjective Information Services, e.g. a personal blog or
website. It depends all on the subjective mutual trust each Information Service consumer has to the specific
Information Services. Its at least a mutual trust between consumers and producers of an Information Service.
The Info Service Ontology and Standards
TODO
TODO
The Info Service Ontology Description
This specification serves as the Info Service Ontology "namespace document". As
such it describes the Info Service Ontology and the terms (RDF classes and properties) that
constitute it, so that Semantic Web applications can
use those terms in a variety of RDF-compatible document formats
and applications.
This document presents the Info Service Ontology as a Semantic Web vocabulary or
Ontology. The Info Service Ontology is pretty simple,
pragmatic and designed to allow simultaneous deployment and
extension. The Info Service Ontology is intended for widescale use, but its authors
make no commitments regarding its suitability for any particular
purpose.
Evolution and Extension of the Info Service Ontology
The Info Service Ontology vocabulary is identified by the namespace URI
'http://purl.org/ontology/is/core#
'. Revisions and
extensions of the Info Service Ontology are conducted through edits to this document,
which by convention is accessible in the Web via the namespace URI.
For practical and deployment reasons, note that we do not
update the namespace URI as the vocabulary matures.
The evolution of the Info Service Ontology is best considered in terms of the
stability of individual vocabulary terms, rather than the
specification as a whole. As terms stabilise in usage and
documentation, they progress through the categories
'unstable', 'testing' and
'stable'. Older terms are marked 'archaic' which allows the possibility of older forms to become modern again.
Note that this mechanism is itself somewhat experimental and evolvin. The definitions of 'stable', 'unstable', 'archaic' and 'testing' cannot
be defined as global absolutes, but only in relationship to the practices, expectations and social structures around some vocabulary. For their use in
the Info Service Ontology, future versions of this specification could usefully offer more detail about what to expect from a term labelled 'stable'.
I would like to thank very much Olaf Hartig (!) and Mats Skillingstad to help to establish this multiple purpose Information Service ontology. Furthermore, Dan Brickley and Libby Miller to provide the basis for this
specification.