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: agr.html
Here are a series of example of the ontology's use showing how it sees agreements relating to data, people (Agents) and so on. These examples are described here and are also described in the SciDataCon publications listed in the References section below.
In PROV-O, data of any form will always be a subclass of prov:Entity.
- How Agreements are Entities
- How Agreements make data
- How data is affected by Agreements
- How Agents make Agreements
- Since Agreements are a sublclass of Entity, the normal PROV-O processes for Agents making Entities apply.
- How Agreements make Agents
- 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 in the past
- How Agents are affected by Agreements in an on-going manner
- What Agreements make Agent do
- coming - a hierarchy of Agreement types hasn't been made yet
An introduction to this ontology was first published at SciDataCon 2016:
- paper online
- presentation
Nicholas Car
Geoscience Australia
nicholas.car@ga.gov.au
Paul Box
CSIRO
paul.j.box@csiro.au