See more information about this ontology in Linked Open Vocabularies.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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://elite.polito.it/ontologies/dogont.owl
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