The Agreements Ontology
This Agreements Ontology is designed to model 'agreements' which are social contracts that include licenses, laws, contracts, Memoranda of Understanding, standards and definitional metadata. Its purpose is to support data sharing by making explicit the relationships between agreements and data and agreements and Agents (people and organisations). Eventually it will also help with the interplay between different classes of agreements.
We think of this ontology as a 'middle' ontology, that is one which specializes well-known, abstract, upper ontologies and is able to be used fairly widely but is expected to be used particular contexts in conjunction with detailed, domain-specific, lower ontologies. We have tried to rely on: existing agent, data manipulation, metadata and licence ontologies where possible. As such we specialise the ORG and FOAF ontologies; the PROV ontology; the Dublin Core Terms RDF schema & DCAT ontology; and the ODRS vocabulary & Creative Commons RDF data models for those areas, respectively.
Turtle format: agr.ttl
HTML format: coming soon
Here are a series of images with notes explaining how this ontology can be used for particular relationships. These examples are all described in the SciDataCon publications listed below.
In PROV-O, data is a type of prov:Entity.
How Agreements make data or How Agreements did affect Entities
How data is affected by Agreements or How Agreements affect Entities
Since Agreements are a sublclass of Entity, the normal PROV-O processes for Agents making Entities apply.
Since Agreements are a subclass of Entity, the normal PROV-O Entity/Agent relationships apply so see How Agreements did affect Entities
How Agents were affected by Agreements or How Agreements did affect Agents
How Agents are affected by Agreements or How Agreements affect Agents
coming - a hierarchy of Agreement types hasn't been made yet
An introduction to this ontology was first published at SciDataCon 2016:
- paper
- and PDF in references folder: Car2016h-Agreeing-about-Agreements.pdf
- presentation
- references folder: Car-Box-Agreeing-about-agreements.pptx
Nicholas Car
Geoscience Australia
nicholas.car@ga.gov.au
Paul Box
CSIRO
paul.j.box@csiro.au