Australian Government Linked Data Working Group

How To

The AGLDWG can assist Australian governments with some Linked Data-related tasks - see Assistance. Additionally, we have quite a few established ways of working that Linked Data users can follow to complete some straightforward Linked Data and Persistent Identifier-related tasks. Here are some.

How to publish an ontology

Suitability

The AGLDWG is keen to assist government organisations publish Semantic Web/Linked Data ontologies for any purposes they see fit within the realm of government business.

Usually this will involve use of the linked.data.gov.au persistent identifier namespace that we support - see our URI Guidelines.

Examples

Here are some big and small ontologies developed by a range of people that core Working Group members have assisted the publication of:

These ontologies were created in very different ways and are delivered online using different systems, but they did share common steps in getting to publication that the AGLDWG assisted with which are listed below.

Process

We suggest this general process if you wish to publish an ontology to be used for Australian Government data:

  1. Design: make your ontology
    • You will have to design this yourself! We can assist with recommending textbooks, people and tools, just ask
    • We recommend using a desktop ontology builder tool to perform your modelling, such as Protégé. It will produce an ontology document in an RDF document
    • At this stage, you could use any made-up namespaces for new ontology elements, perhaps http://example.com/ which is a well-known testing IRI.
  2. Identify: arrange a suitable IRI namespace
    • The AGLDWG supports the use of linked.data.gov.au for the creation of long-term persistent ontology identifiers and namespaces.
    • Ontologies are likely to be created within the def/ register of linked.data.gov.au
    • You will need a sensible identifier part for your ontology within def/. For the above, examples, all three use acronyms, for example the PID for Australian Biodiversity Information Standard is https://linked.data.gov.au/def/abis but you may choose other methods to create a PID
    • See our URI Guidelines for all the particulars.
    • The WG will assist with all parts of this.
  3. Present: make human-readable forms
    • An ontology must, at least, be delivered in an RDF file (in rdf/xml, text/turtle or another RDF format). However, it is good practice and a requirement of the AGLDWG to also provide a human-readable version of the ontology to document it, usually a web page (HTML).
    • The latter can be generated from ontology files using a range of tools such as LODE or pyLODE. It may also be delivered live, our of a Linked Data documentation application.
    • The AGRIF and SMURF examples above used pyLODE to make static HTML
    • We suggest including a diagram of the ontology’s main classes and relationships. These may have to be prepared separately as tools like pyLODE won’t make them it automatically, but they really help with ontology understanding.
    • Tools like WebVOWL can automatically make ontology diagrams, but (some of us at least!) think that hand-made ontology diagrams are best.
    • See ABIS’ many diagrams in the examples above
  4. Deliver: put online
    • Once a human-readable form of the ontology has been made, it will need to be delivered online so it can be read.
    • The AGLDWG can host simple ontologies easily for you in our GitHub account. We host the AGRIF example above.