New semantic artefacts can be built upon existing artefacts. In many cases the reuse is made by copying and pasting bits and pieces of semantic artefacts together. This does not allow accessing automatically the reused elements and their semantic artefact. In order to be able track the element reused from other semantic artefacts, reference to third party semantic artefact should be made explicit. For this, external semantic artefact (in part or in full) should be imported using a specific metadata element to represent the import (e.g. <owl:import/>). When using such explicit reference, it becomes possible to extract this information automatically from the artefacts.
This reference can be made just by providing a direct link to the used resource or by describing the link as inbound and outbound links as proposed by LOV or by using VoID vocabulary to interlink the different ontologies or even by considering the requirement of the Minimum Information to Reference an External OnTology, MIREOT (Courtot et al., 2009).
This recommendation does not pretend to enforce a particular solution but rather emphasizes the need for the community of semantic web to define a common way of importing external semantic artefacts.
Description
New semantic artefacts can be built upon existing artefacts. In many cases the reuse is made by copying and pasting bits and pieces of semantic artefacts together. This does not allow accessing automatically the reused elements and their semantic artefact. In order to be able track the element reused from other semantic artefacts, reference to third party semantic artefact should be made explicit. For this, external semantic artefact (in part or in full) should be imported using a specific metadata element to represent the import (e.g. <owl:import/>). When using such explicit reference, it becomes possible to extract this information automatically from the artefacts.
This reference can be made just by providing a direct link to the used resource or by describing the link as inbound and outbound links as proposed by LOV or by using VoID vocabulary to interlink the different ontologies or even by considering the requirement of the Minimum Information to Reference an External OnTology, MIREOT (Courtot et al., 2009).
This recommendation does not pretend to enforce a particular solution but rather emphasizes the need for the community of semantic web to define a common way of importing external semantic artefacts.
Existing recommendations:
● LOV[48]
● VoID[49]
● MIREOT[50]
Stakeholder: Practitioner