Ontology design for UK Parliament

Hello

I'm currently working for UK Parliament [1] and we're interested in designing a formal ontology for our procedural data. Initially for use in internal systems but also mapping to common vocabularies for publishing.

We'd like to do this in as open and collaborative a way as possible and we're wondering if this group would be a good place to do that?

# some background

Parliament has been publishing linked (ish) open data [2] for a while but the current offering is less than optimal. For historical reasons around multiple internal applications and workflows our data isn't really linked in a way that makes sense to users. Or indeed to Parliament.

Internal tools have been developed on a fairly ad hoc basis over the years to meet business needs from a variety of departments but no-one has ever identified how the things and data about the things should interrelate so the data has never been greater than the sum of its parts. Or indeed the sum of its parts [3]

The basic problem we're trying to solve is data integration across siloed applications but there's never been a domain model or formal ontology designed. So we publish RDF but the Parliament ontology referenced is a 404...

We've recently started work on domain modelling around the main business items of Parliament [3], [4]. That work isn't quite complete but it gives a fairly good 10,000 feet view of the major things we need to cover.

The next step is to design a formal ontology to describe some of these things for use in an internal triple store. Because we've been a little burnt in the past by being over reliant on public vocabularies and changes to those vocabularies affecting inference in the triple store we'd like to have some control over this ontology rather than just reuse what exists. But we'd also like to collaborate on this with other Parliaments and with the wider community so that it can be reused by others. We'd like to map any terms defined by our ontology to public vocabularies where possible. And work with schema.org eg (alongside other parliaments) to expand their descriptions (again where possible).

Would this make sense as something that might happen in this community?

thanks
Michael


[1] http://www.parliament.uk/
[2] http://www.data.parliament.uk/
[3] http://www.slideshare.net/fantasticlife/toward-a-parliamentary-domain-model
[4] https://github.com/ukpds/domain-models

Received on Wednesday, 24 August 2016 20:36:19 UTC