Eurobau Utility Ontology

Title: Eurobau Utility Ontology
URI: http://semantic.eurobau.com/eurobau-utility.owl
Description: The Eurobau Utility Ontology provides utility elements for describing building materials and respective offerings from the Eurobau semantic dataspace. This ontology defines a few extensions to GoodRelations.
License: CC-BY 3.0
Languages: English, German
Ontology languages: OWL
Ontology format: RDF/XML
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.

P07. Merging different concepts in the same class3 cases detected. Minor

A class is created whose identifier is referring to two or more different concepts. An example of this type of pitfall is to create the class "StyleAndPeriod", or "ProductOrService".

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

P08. Missing annotations13 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 properties6 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 relationships45 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:

P22. Using different naming criteria in the ontology ontology *Minor

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

P24. Using recursive definition2 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 itself2 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 one2 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 classes2 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 classes2 cases 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:

P36. URI contains file extension ontology *Minor

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://semantic.eurobau.com/eurobau-utility.owl

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).