Evaluation of existing ontologies – rules to decide if an ontology is appropriate for INSPIRE schemas

[jechterhoff]

Description

It is a general principle to reuse existing ontologies, if appropriate, and avoid creating new definitions.

Several of the identified issues are concerned with identifying vocabularies that can be used to represent elements of the INSPIRE conceptual schemas, i.e. classes and properties defined by and used in the INSPIRE application schemas.

NOTE: http://www.w3.org/TR/ld-bp/#VOCABULARIES and http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#dataVocabularies provide starting points for the evaluation of vocabularies.

Discussion Item

Which criteria / methods / rules should be applied to decide if an existing ontology is appropriate for use in INSPIRE RDF schemas?

The following list is a start, but needs more work:

• Maturity: Are these vocabularies complete and stable? Do they have known issues?
• Governance: Are these vocabularies governed by a standards body or does another active governance mechanism exist?
• Use: Are there existing implementations? What is the uptake in the community?
• Compatibility: How close are the concepts in the ontology to the relevant INSPIRE concepts?
• ...