Usage of an upper ontology for top concepts

[pietervaneverdingen]

Context

PLDN Thesaurus

Category

Hierarchical Structure

Focal point

All concepts in the PLDN Thesaurus

Summary

Usage of an upper ontology can help to make vocabularies more interoperable and to make search and navigation in hierarchical structures of thesauri more consistent and more user-friendly.

Description

Several upper ontologies have been proposed in the past, but none of them was widely accepted (and some of them have been archived and/or are replaced), e.g. SUMO, BFO, PROTON, Dolce & DnS Ultralite, Gist, etc. or they are applicable for a certain domain, e.g. NTA 8035 for the built environment. A subset of the top classes of Schema.org is another option or a subset of the concepts in the knowledge graph of KBpedia. So far, none of these options provide more clarity for the user, it doesn't improve findability and it just adds one (or more) extra levels in the hierarchical structure. But, the question is, whether we are not overlooking other options that might be more preferable than the solution scenario we have in mind now. We would like to invite reviewers to give feedback on the proposed solution scenario and to give suggestions for better options via the comments section for this issue.

Solution scenario

Fow now, we want to start using 22 more generic domain-specific concepts as top concepts and add more top concepts when needed, e.g. for Licenses. And the general approach is to position what you would like to emphasize and what you want to make easy to find as high as possible in the hierarchical tree.

The 22 top concepts for the first review version of the PLDN Thesaurus are (EN / NL):

• Applications / Toepassingen
• Assumptions /Aannames
• Best Practices / Best Practices
• Data / Data
• Formats / Formaten
• Identifiers / Identifiers
• Interfaces / Interfaces
• Interoperability / Interoperabiliteit
• Languages / Talen
• Mappings / Mappingen
• Models / Modellen
• Principles / Principes
• Processes / Processen
• Profiles / Profielen
• Protocols / Protocollen
• RDF Ecosystem / RDF Ecosysteem
• Reasoning / Redeneren
• Standards / Standaarden
• Strategies / Strategieen
• Tooling / Tooling
• Vocabularies / Vocabulaires
• World Wide Web / World Wide Web

And we want to make use of poly hierarchy, where a concept can have multiple broader relations in the hierarchical tree.