Developing the SSHOC Reference Ontology

The SSHOC Reference Ontology (SSHOCro) is developed in the context of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project. The SSHOC project aims to support the discipline-specific part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) focused on the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The SSHOCro was developed within Task 4.7 Modelling the SSHOC Life Cycle as part of SSHOC Work Package 4 focusing on innovations in data production. The goal of the SSHOCro is to establish a common framework for organising knowledge around all steps in the research data life cycle within the SSH domain. The model - described in Resource Description Framework (RDF) schema - is event-based and aims to capture all the relevant scientific activities of the data lifecycle including the tools, datasets and services used at each phase. SSHOCro is based on the CIDOC-CRM, an ontology for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. The work on SSHOCro was coordinated by FORTH, in particular by Athina Kritsotaki, Eleni Tsouloucha, Chrysoula Bekiari and Maria Theodoridou, hereafter referred to as “the authors” of the SSHOCro. Various SSHOC partners and stakeholders were consulted in SSHOCro’s development, including data archives and repositories, research infrastructures and data catalogues. The work on SSHOCro started in March 2019 and a final model will be presented at the end of the SSHOC project in March 2022. The ontology will however be further developed and refined after the project.