Re: Representing time varying data - suggestions for ontologies?

On Jul 30, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Bill Roberts wrote:

> Suppose I want to say something like:
>
> The total rainfall in Edinburgh in 2006 was 600mm.
>
> There are various ways to do it, but I'd probably go for something  
> like this in pseudo-RDF
>
> Edinburgh  hasMeasuredProperty  _b
> _b  measureOf  "Annual Rainfall"
> _b  period  "2006"
> _b  rdf:value  "600"
> _b  unit  "mm"
>
> (with some xsd data types added in).
>
> The same general pattern applies to population of a country, or  
> sales of a product etc. I'd expect this pattern of data to appear  
> very frequently, but found it surprisingly difficult to find similar  
> examples on the web (other than in the RDF Primer! - and the  
> GoodRelations ontology does this kind of thing for  
> PriceSpecification).

Right, SWeb practice hasn't quite caught up with this level of  
sophistication on a large scale yet, though this kind of approach is  
commonplace in legacy KRep systems. Also there is widespread prejudice  
against the use of bnodes in this way, but OTOH people don't want to  
have to coin a large number of URIs either, a combination which tends  
to produce paralysis. Also further, the OWL in RDF encodings used  
rdf:collection syntax much more than this bnode-star-cluster kind of  
structure, and that seems to have set a fashion.

BTW, you might want to rethink some of this. Its not a good idea to  
have the units and value separated like that, because if someone wants  
to put a measure in inches, you are in trouble. Better to have a  
separate quantity node with the units/value pair attached. Also, you  
might want to consider something a bit more structured than just  
'period', since there's nothing to indicate that its the total for  
this period that you are considering. It does get a bit complicated  
quite quickly, unfortunately.

>  Can anyone suggest good ontologies/vocabularies I should consider  
> in areas like socio-economic data, physical properties, weather,  
> earth science that support this type of structure?

I think you can use this style with many vocabularies, in fact.

>
> The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab SWEET ontologies seem relevant and are  
> very comprehensive, if rather sparsely documented (http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/ontology/ 
> ). Anyone used those in anger?

I know they have been used, yes. NOt by me, but Im sure by others. And  
they are very well maintained and professional.

Pat Hayes

>
> Thanks for any tips
>
> Bill
>
>
>
>

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Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 19:53:41 UTC