The Event Ontology


Title
The Event Ontology
URI
http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl
Description
The event ontology deals with the notion of reified events. It defines one main Event concept. An event may have a location, a time, active agents, factors and products, as depicted below.
License
CC-BY 3.0
Languages
English
Ontology languages
OWL
Ontology format
N3
Issued
2007-10-25
Version
1.0
Alignments
See alignments

See more information about this ontology in Linked Open Vocabularies.

Evaluation results

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

OOPS! logoIt 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.

Ontology elements (classes, relationships or attributes) are created with no relation to the rest of the ontology. An example of this type of pitfall is to create the relationship "memberOfTeam" and to miss the class representing teams; thus, the relationship created is isolated in the ontology.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

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:

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:

Ontology elements are not named using the same convention within the whole ontology. It is considered a good practice that the rules and style of lexical encoding for naming the different ontology elements is homogeneous within the ontology. One possibility for rules is that concept names start with capital letters and property names start with non-capital letters. In the case of style, there are different options such as camel case, hyphen style, underscore style, and the combinations. Some notions about naming conventions are provided in [2].

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements

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:

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:

Guidelines in [5] suggest avoiding file extension in persistent URIs, particularly those related to the technology used, as for example ".php" or ".py". In our case we have adapted it to the ontology web languages used to formalized ontologies and their serializations. In this regard, we consider as pitfall including file extensions as ".owl", ".rdf", ".ttl", ".n3" and ".rdfxml" in an ontology URI. An example of this pitfall (at 29th June, 2012) could be found in the "BioPAX Level 3 ontology (biopax)" ontology��s URI (http://www.biopax.org/release/biopax-level3.owl) that contains the extension ".owl" related to the technology used.

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements and it appears in the ontology URI: http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl

References: