The W3C PROV Ontology


Title
The W3C PROV Ontology
URI
http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#
Description
The PROV Ontology (PROV-O) expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). It provides a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange provenance information generated in different systems and under different contexts. It can also be specialized to create new classes and properties to model provenance information for different applications and domains.
License
W3C
Languages
English
Ontology languages
OWL
Ontology format
RDF/XML
Issued
2011-12-13
Last modified
2013-4-30
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.

P08. Missing annotations50 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 properties8 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 relationships15 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:

P19. Swapping intersection and union6 cases detected. Critical

The ranges and/or domains of the properties (relationships and attributes) are defined by intersecting several classes in cases in which the ranges and/or domains should be the union of such classes. An example of this type of pitfall is to create the relationship "takesPlaceIn" with domain "OlympicGames" and with range the intersection of the classes "City" and "Nation". Another example can be to create the attribute "Name" for the classes "City" and "Drink" and to define its domain as the intersection of both classes. This pitfall is related to the common error that appears when defining ranges and domains described in [3] and also related to the guidelines for defining these elements provided in [2].

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 definition1 case 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 itself1 case 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:

References: