Published March 21, 2024 | Version v1
Project deliverable Open

D3.1 – Preliminary ontology design and development

  • 1. ROR icon Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
  • 2. ROR icon National Research Council
  • 1. ROR icon Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
  • 2. ROR icon Flanders Marine Institute

Description

This document presents the initial versions of the ontologies created in MAREGRAPH, which 
are needed to represent the data stored in the WoRMS database in Linked Open Data, thus 
increasing semantic interoperability for identified high-value data.

The document provides a description of the ontologies produced, which can be viewed as 
modular ontology modules linked together, forming the so-called APHIA ontology network. 
The modularisation approach that covers different aspects of marine species data (e.g., taxa 
names, geographical distributions, attributes and traits) allows for flexibility and adaptation 
of the data models to specific needs.

The network currently consists of four domain OWL ontology modules and a top-level OWL 
ontology, the purpose of which is both to link the various domain entities and to define all 
those entities that are independent of the specific domain but necessary to fulfil modelling 
requirements. The top-level ontology is based on well-known foundational ontologies
available at the state of the art (e.g., DOLCE).

The document also describes the methodology that was applied to achieve the result. The 
methodology is contextualised within the processes outlined in D2.1; it involves conducting a 
state-of-the-art analysis on the existing standards, ontologies and vocabularies of the domain, 
which this document discusses, and collecting requirements. The requirements that were 
gathered during the first year of the project in various forms, such as use cases, competency
questions (questions to be asked about the data), bottom-up analysis of data from WoRMS, 
are summarised in the deliverable. 

Finally, a reference example of Linked Open Data for a specific marine species is introduced 
in the document to provide a guide on the use of the ontology modules in the presence of 
real data taken from the WoRMS system.

The results included in this document are preparatory to the technical activities of WP4 and 
WP5. These activities will also be necessary to refine the ontology modules introduced here 
for the production of the final version of the ontologies envisaged in the subsequent 
deliverable D3.2.

The various versions of the ontologies are publicly available on the github repository of the 
project (https://github.com/MareGraph-EU/assets/tree/main).

Controlled vocabularies for certain entities identified in ontologies have yet to be prepared. 
However, the document highlights those entities whose individuals may be good candidates 
to be concepts of controlled vocabularies built using the SKOS Web standard.

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D3.1_MareGraph_Deliverable_Final.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

References
Project deliverable: 10.5281/zenodo.8167337 (DOI)

Funding

Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL) 101100771
European Commission