Geopolitical Ontology - Geopolitical Ontology in Linked Open Data

Geopolitical Ontology in Linked Open Data

The FAO Geopolitical ontology is embracing the W3C Linked Open Data (LOD) initiative and released its RDF version of the geopolitical ontology in March 2011. The term 'Linked Open Data' refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. The key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs, HTTP and RDF.

The RDF version of the geopolitical ontology is compliant with all Linked data principles to be included in the Linked Open Data cloud, as explained in the following paragraphs.

  • Resolvable http:// URIs:

Every resource in the OWL format of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has a unique URI. Dereferenciation was implemented to allow for three different URIs to be assigned to each resource as follows:

URI identifying the non-information resource Information resource with an RDF/XML representation Information resource with an HTML representation

In addition the current URIs used for OWL format needed to be kept to allow for backwards compatibility for other systems that are using them. Therefore, the new URIs for the FAO Geopolitical Ontology in LOD were carefully created, using “Cool URIs for Semantic Web” and considering other good practices for URIs, such as DBpedia URIs.

  • New URIs:

The URIs of the geopolitical ontology need to be permanent, consequently all transient information, such as year, version, or format was avoided in the definition of the URIs. The new URIs can be accessed at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/ For example, for the resource “Italy” the URIs are the following:

http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy: identifies the non-information resource. http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data/Italy: identifies the resource with an RDF/XML representation. http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy: identifies the information resource with an HTML representation.

In addition, the “owl:sameAs” is used to map the new URIs to the OWL representation.

  • Dereferencing URIs:

When a non-information resource is looked up without any specific representation format, then, the server needs to redirect the request to information resource with an HTML representation. For example, to retrieve the resource “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy), which is a non-information resource, the server redirects to the html page of “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy).

  • At least 1000 triples in the datasets:

The total number of triple statements in FAO Geopolitical Ontology is 22,495. At least 50 links to a dataset already in the current LOD Cloud: FAO Geopolitical Ontology has 195 links to DBpedia, which is already part of the LOD Cloud.

  • Access to the entire dataset:

FAO Geopolitical Ontology provides the entire dataset as a RDF dump. It is available at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data

The RDF version of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has been already registered in CKAN (http://ckan.net/package/fao-geopolitical-ontology) and it was requested to add it into the LOD Cloud.

Read more about this topic:  Geopolitical Ontology

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