D4.18 SSHOCro_v.1.0_beta version

The SSHOC Reference Ontology (SSHOCro) proposes an ontological model and RDF Schema to be used as a top-level ontology for organizing knowledge and information found distributed across various primary sources of information in the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC).

It aspires to provide a semantic interoperability framework for the description of the SSHOC data lifecycle, by offering a conceptual model that can be used in order to describe at a generic level the real-world lifecycle of data produced by the generic workflow of processes of collection, connection, interpretation and the auxiliary activities of storing, publishing and finding data –as it actually takes place in the various domains of Social Sciences and Humanities. Its development has, in fact, been informed by data lifecycle management practices in use, in said disciplines. In practical terms, the use of such a model and schema for the research community is twofold: it can be applied as a standard to be used in the step of devising and implementing metadata capture scheme for tracking the data lifecycle in individual projects, institutions and disciplines; it can also be used to map, transform and integrate existing data across projects, institutions and disciplines into interoperable pools of information for reuse and exploitation. Within this frame, SSHOCro proposes an ontological model that tries to capture the tools and services used by research communities across the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines at each point in the data lifecycle, the kind of data they generate/capture, how and by whom are the ensuing data maintained, used, published and archived and under what conditions. In that sense, SSHOCro assumes the event-centric approach of digital provenance models, which allows tracing the intermediate results (data) of the processes involved in the research workflows in SSH. In this context, keeping track of the processes involved in the data lifecycle amounts to associating each stage with a set of activities performed in it.

SSHOCro is being developed in the context of the SSHOC Project, the aim of which is to create the social sciences and humanities area of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) thereby facilitating access to flexible, scalable research data and related services streamlined to the precise needs of the SSH community.