Re: looking for an event ontology/vocabulary

My colleagues Raphaël Troncy and Lynda Hardman and I have recently
published an event ontology which is heavily based on Yves' event
ontology but which tries to address some of the clarity issues that
Pat has raised. You can find it at

http://linkedevents.org/ontology/

There is an accompanying tech report in which we discuss the modeling
decisions we made and review a number of other ontologies covering
events. Where possible we provide mappings between our properties and
properties from these other ontologies in the ontology file at

http://linkedevents.org/ontology/2009-07-28/rdfxml

The tech report should be online next week (we're currently making
some final revisions.

Our primary interest is in events as reported in news or represented
in historical narrative, which is quite different from, e.g., a
scientific notion of an event as a well-defined process or as part of
a causal mechanism. I think there is probably room for several
different event ontologies given the fuzziness of the concept and the
different modes of understanding (i.e. science vs. history vs. law vs.
"everyday" practical understanding). But we believe this one provides
a useful balance between simplicity and clarity for the kind of use
cases we have in mind.

There are a number of examples of events modeled using our vocabulary at

http://view.linkedevents.org/session/browse

Note that the dataset at the URL above also includes some events,
specifically the Emma Goldman and Congressional Biography ones,
modeled using other vocabularies which we have mapped to ours.

Your feedback (even harsh criticism) is welcome!

Cheers,
Ryan Shaw

Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 05:39:29 UTC