The W3C SemanticThe W3C Sensor Network Ontology

Title: The W3C SemanticThe W3C Sensor Network Ontology
URI: http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn
Description: This ontology describes sensors and observations, and related concepts. It does not describe domain concepts, time, locations, etc. these are intended to be included from other ontologies via OWL imports.
License: W3C
Languages: English
Ontology languages: OWL
Ontology format: RDF/XML
Last modified: 2011-6-20
Alignments: See alignments

Evaluation results

The following evaluation results have been generated by the RESTFul web service provided by OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!).

It is obvious that not all the pitfalls are equally important; their impact in the ontology will depend on multiple factors. For this reason, each pitfall has an importance level attached indicating how important it is. We have identified three levels:

Critical: It is crucial to correct the pitfall. Otherwise, it could affect the ontology consistency, reasoning, applicability, etc.
Important: Though not critical for ontology function, it is important to correct this type of pitfall.
Minor: It is not really a problem, but by correcting it we will make the ontology nicer.

P02. Creating synonyms as classes1 case detected. Minor

Several classes whose identifiers are synonyms are created and defined as equivalent. As an example we could define "Car", "Motorcar" and "Automobile" as equivalent classes. Another example is to define the classes "Waterfall" and "Cascade" as equivalents. This pitfall is related to the guidelines presented in [2] which explain that synonyms for the same concept do not represent different classes.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn#SensorInput

P08. Missing annotations23 cases detected. Minor

Ontology terms lack annotations properties. This kind of properties improves the ontology understanding and usability from a user point of view.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P11. Missing domain or range in properties44 cases detected. Important

Relationships and/or attributes without domain or range (or none of them) are included in the ontology. There are situations in which the relation is very general and the range should be the most general concept "Thing". However, in other cases, the relations are more specific and it could be a good practice to specify its domain and/or range. An example of this type of pitfall is to create the relationship "hasWritten" in an ontology about art in which the relationship domain should be "Writer" and the relationship range should be "LiteraryWork". This pitfall is related to the common error when defining ranges and domains described in [3].

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P13. Missing inverse relationships27 cases detected. Minor

This pitfall appears when a relationship (except for the symmetric ones) has not an inverse relationship defined within the ontology. For example, the case in which the ontology developer omits the inverse definition between the relations "hasLanguageCode" and "isCodeOf", or between "hasReferee" and "isRefereeOf".

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P20. Misusing ontology annotations1 case detected. Minor

The contents of some annotation properties are swapped or misused. An example of this type of pitfall is to include in the Label annotation of the class "Crossroads" the following sentence ��the place of intersection of two or more roads��; and to include in the Comment annotation the word 'Crossroads'.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DUL.owl#isAgentInvolvedIn

P24. Using recursive definition17 cases detected. Important

An ontology element is used in its own definition. For example, it is used to create the relationship "hasFork" and to establish as its range the following ��the set of restaurants that have at least one value for the relationship "hasFork".

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P25. Defining a relationship inverse to itself4 cases detected. Important

A relationship is defined as inverse of itself. In this case, this property could have been defined as "owl:SymmetricProperty" instead.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P26. Defining inverse relationships for a symmetric one4 cases detected. Important

A relationship is defined as "owl:SymmetricProperty" and there is also a relationship (it could be itself or another relationship) defined as its inverse.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P30. Missing equivalent classes6 cases detected. Important

When an ontology is imported into another, classes with the same conceptual meaning that are duplicated in both ontologies should be defined as equivalent classes to benefit the interoperability between both ontologies. However, the ontology developer misses the definition of equivalent classes in the cases of duplicated concepts. An example of this pitfall can be not to have the equivalent knowledge explicitly defined between "Trainer" (class in the imported ontology) and "Coach" (class in the ontology about sports being developed).

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P31. Defining wrong equivalent classes1 case detected. Critical

Two classes are defined as equivalent when they are not necessarily equivalent. For example, defining ��Car�� as equivalent to ��Vehicle��

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn#SensorInput , http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn#Stimulus

References:

[1] Gómez-Pérez, A. Ontology Evaluation. Handbook on Ontologies. S. Staab and R. Studer Editors. Springer. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Pp: 251 – 274. 2004.
[2] Noy, N.F., McGuinness. D. L. Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology. Technical Report SMI-2001-0880, Standford Medical Informatics. 2001.
[3] Rector, A., Drummond, N., Horridge, M., Rogers, J., Knublauch, H., Stevens, R.,; Wang, H., Wroe, C. ''Owl pizzas: Practical experience of teaching owl–dl: Common errors and common patterns''. In Proc. of EKAW 2004, pp: 63 – 81. Springer. 2004.
[4] Hogan, A., Harth, A., Passant, A., Decker, S., Polleres, A. Weaving the Pedantic Web. Linked Data on the Web Workshop LDOW2010 at WWW2010 (2010).
[5] Archer, P., Goedertier, S., and Loutas, N. D7.1.3 – Study on persistent URIs, with identification of best practices and recommendations on the topic for the MSs and the EC. Deliverable. December 17, 2012.
[6] Heath, T., Bizer, C.: Linked data: Evolving the Web into a global data space (1st edition). Morgan & Claypool (2011).