The Weighting Ontology 0.1

Namespace Document 14 September 2010

This version:
http://purl.org/ontology/wo/20100914/weightingontology.html (OWL, N3)
Latest version:
http://purl.org/ontology/wo/core# (OWL, N3)
Authors:
Bob Ferris (SMI)
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Valid XHTML + RDFa Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This copyright applies to the Weighting Ontology Specification and accompanying documentation in RDF. Regarding underlying technology, the Weighting Ontology uses W3C's RDF technology, an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.


Abstract

The Weighting Ontology specification provides a vocabulary for describing weightings and their referenced scales, on/ for the Semantic Web. This document contains a RDFa description of the Weighting Ontology and some additional information and examples.

Status of This Document

The Weighting Ontology includes a multiple purpose weighting concept on top of Statistical Core Vocabulary. 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 Weighting Ontology for this specification (see here for SpecGen version 6 by Bob Ferris).

This document is created by combining the RDFS/OWL machine-readable Weighting 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 author's email addresses.

Table of Contents

The Weighting Ontology at a glance

The wo:Weight and wo:Scale concepts as graph with relations:

The weight and scale concept as graph with 
relations

An a-z index of Weighting Ontology terms, by class (categories or types) and by property.

Classes: | Scale | Weight |

Properties: | max_weight | min_weight | scale | step_size | weight | weight_value |

Examples

TODO

Introduction: Weighting Ontology Basics

What's the Weighting Ontology for?

The Weighting Ontology includes a general multiple purpose weight concept. This concept can be used to associate any concept to a wo:Weight instance(s) with the property wo:weight. The second property of wo:Weight is wo:weight_value, which is a simple xsd:decimal based datatype property to associate the numeric value of the weighting.
Furthermore, this ontology includes a wo:Scale, which is modeled as a sub class of scovo:Dimension to relate it to its specified scovo:Item based concept (wo:Weight) via wo:scale. To define the range of this scale the properties wo:min_weight and wo:min_weight can be used. These are sub properties of the related minimum and maximum properties of the Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo:min and scovo:max) and the Review Vocabulary (rev:minRating and rev:maxRating). Finally one can define a step size (wo:step_size) for the weighting scales.

Background

TODO

The Weighting Ontology and Standards

TODO

TODO

The Weighting Ontology Description

This specification serves as the Weighting Ontology "namespace document". As such it describes the Weighting 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 Weighting Ontology as a Semantic Web vocabulary or Ontology. The Weighting Ontology is pretty simple, pragmatic and designed to allow simultaneous deployment and extension. The Weighting Ontology is intended for widescale use, but its authors make no commitments regarding its suitability for any particular purpose.

Evolution and Extension of the Weighting Ontology

The Weighting Ontology is identified by the namespace URI 'http://purl.org/ontology/wo/core#'. Revisions and extensions of the Weighting 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 Weighting 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.

The Weighting Ontology cross-reference: Listing the Weighting Ontology Classes and Properties

The Weighting Ontology introduces the following classes and properties. There is a link at the top of this document to the RDF/XML and RDF/N3 versions.

Classes: | Scale | Weight |

Properties: | max_weight | min_weight | scale | step_size | weight | weight_value |

Classes and Properties (full detail)


Classes

Class: wo:Weight

Weight - A weight class to enable timestamped (etc.) weights.
Status: testing
Properties include: scale weight_value
Used with: weight
Sub class of scovo:Item
OWL Class
RDFS Class

[#] [back to top]


Class: wo:Scale

Scale - A concept for describing scales for weights.
Status: unstable
Properties include: max_weight step_size min_weight
Used with: scale
Sub class of scovo:Dimension
OWL Class
RDFS Class

[#] [back to top]


Properties

Property: wo:weight_value

has weight value - The specific value of a weight.
Status: testing
Domain: Weight
Range: xsd:decimal
RDF Property
Datatype Property
Functional Property

[#] [back to top]


Property: wo:max_weight

has max weight - A maximum weight of a scale.
Status: unstable
Domain: Scale
Range: xsd:decimal
Sub property of scovo:max rev:maxRating
RDF Property
Datatype Property
Functional Property

[#] [back to top]


Property: wo:min_weight

has min weight - A minimum weight of a scale.
Status: unstable
Domain: Scale
Range: xsd:decimal
Sub property of scovo:min rev:minRating
RDF Property
Datatype Property
Functional Property

[#] [back to top]


Property: wo:scale

has scale - A scale for the weighting of some relation.
Status: unstable
Domain: Weight
Range: Scale
Sub property of scovo:dimension
RDF Property
Object Property
Functional Property

[#] [back to top]


Property: wo:step_size

has step size - A predefined step size for weight of a specific scale.
Status: unstable
Domain: Scale
Range: xsd:decimal
RDF Property
Datatype Property
Functional Property

[#] [back to top]


Property: wo:weight

has weight - The weight on some relation, e.g. a interest in a topic, or of an interest that is valid for a specific period of time or was raised up in a specific period of time.
Status: unstable
Domain: owl:Thing
Range: Weight
Sub property of event:factor
RDF Property
Object Property

[#] [back to top]


External Vocabulary References

The description of the terms in the Weighting Ontology 'dictionary' make reference to classes and properties elsewhere. This section of the Weighting Ontology specification provides a placeholder reference for any Weighting Ontology mention of externally defined terms. For example, sometimes we might say that Counter Ontology property has a domain or range of an externally defined class, or that a Weighting Ontology class is a sub-class of an external class, or 'disjoint with' such a class (ie. has no common members). Such claims help fix the intended meaning of Weighting Ontology terms in relationship to other 'peer' vocabularies.
Currently, the Weighting Ontology sub classes:

scovo:Item
A statistical data item.
scovo:Dimension
A dimension of a statistical data item.

Status Vocabulary

Each term in the Weighting Ontology is annotated with properties from the SemWeb Vocab Status Ontology

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 Weighting Ontology, future versions of this specification could usefully offer more detail about what to expect from a term labelled 'stable'.

vs:term_status
The vs:term_status property indicates the status of a vocabulary term, one of 'stable','unstable','testing' or 'archaic'.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank very much Dan Brickley, Libby Miller and Yves Raimond to provide the basis for this specification.

Recent Changes

============================
Version 0.1 (September 2010)
============================
 * ADDED: wo:Weight - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary and opened the rdfs:domain to owl:Thing
 * ADDED: wo:Scale - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:weight - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:scale - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:weight_value - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:min_weight - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:max_weight - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary
 * ADDED: wo:step_size - outsourced from the Weighted Interests Vocabulary