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Documentation, backgrounders and tutorial material related to information design, engineering, semantics, ontologies, and vocabularies

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Standards for Linked Data and the Semantic Web

Contents of this page

International standards context is a brief listing of the main standards organizations involved.

Finding an ontology

There is no single place to track down existing ontologies relevant to your requirements. These are a few places that do know about a useful set of ontologies as a potential starting point:

Note, however, that these sources only know about ontologies that have been registered with them, which is managed on an ad-hoc basis.

Standard namespaces - RDF vocabularies and ontologies that you can trust

These ontologies and vocabularies of RDF terms are well maintained and widely used, so elements from them can reasonably be adopted in new ontologies.

Note, however, that they were not all designed as part of a consistent suite, so if it is planned to use them in applications involving inferencing or reasoning, then it is wise to check whether axioms or entailments have any clashes or inconsistencies between modules.

RDF infrastructure

vocabulary scope prefix namespace URI
RDF Basic RDF elements rdf: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
RDF Schema RDF Schema elements rdfs: http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#
Web Ontology Language (OWL) OWL elements owl: http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#
SKOS SKOS elements skos: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#
SHACL SHACL elements sh: http://www.w3.org/ns/shacl#

Descriptive metadata

vocabulary scope prefix namespace URI resources
Dublin Core General purpose metadata dcterms: dct: http://purl.org/dc/terms/  
Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) Descriptions of datasets and data-services dcat: http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat#  
DCAT-AP 2.0.0 DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe dcat:   RDFS representation
SHACL representation
GeoDCAT-AP 1.0.1 GeoDCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe dcat:    
Schema.org General purpose metadata, used mostly for web-pages
and the (often commercial) services that they describe		 schema: sdo: https://schema.org/  
Science on Schema.org ‘science profile’ of Schema.org (EarthCube project) schema: sdo:   Shape graphs
DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary statistical and social science research and survey data disco: http://rdf-vocabulary.ddialliance.org/discovery# RDF Representation
Data Quality Vocabulary Data quality descriptions and metrics dqv: http://www.w3.org/ns/dqv#  
Provenance Ontology High-level model for provenance of items - activity-centric prov: http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#  

Space and Time

vocabulary scope prefix namespace URI
GeoSPARQL geometry & basic topology geo: http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql#
GeoSPARQL Extensions geometry metrics geox: http://linked.data.gov.au/def/geox#
OWL-Time Temporal entities and relationships time: http://www.w3.org/2006/time#
Time aggregates Temporal aggregates time: http://www.w3.org/2006/time#
Temporal relations The missing relationships time: http://www.w3.org/2006/time#

Organizations and people

vocabulary scope prefix namespace URI
Friend of a friend agents, persons, organizations - the original social-network ontology foaf: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
Organization Ontology organizational structures and affiliations org: http://www.w3.org/ns/org#
vcard People, organizations, addresses vcard: v: http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#

Encoding data

vocabulary scope prefix namespace URI
Semantic Sensor Network Ontology Metadata for observations and samples sosa:
ssn:		 http://www.w3.org/ns/sosa/
http://www.w3.org/ns/ssn/
Extensions to SSN Observation Collections, samples and feature-of-interest links sosa:
ssn:		 http://www.w3.org/ns/sosa/
http://www.w3.org/ns/ssn/
Darwin Core biodiversity observations, esp. occurrences dwc:
dwciri:		 http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/
QUDT Quantities, Units, Dimensions and Data Types qudt: http://qudt.org/2.1/schema/qudt
RDF Data Cube Tabular (‘rectangular’) data, surveys and statistics (SDMX) qb: http://purl.org/linked-data/cube#

W3C semantics stack - references

semantic web stack

RDF - the Resource Description Framework

OWL - the Web Ontology Language

Basic description logic

SKOS - the Simple Knowledge Organization System

Collections of terms+definitions organized in a hierarchy

SPARQL - the SPARQL RDF Query Language

RDF Shapes

RDF validation

Geospatial metadata

Other metadata