New Generation Metadata Vocabulary for Ontology Description and Publication

Abstract

Abstract. Scientific communities are using an increasing number of ontologies and vocabularies. Currently, the problem lies in the difficulty to find and select them for a specific knowledge engineering task. Thus, there is a real need to precisely describe these ontologies with adapted metadata, but none of the existing metadata vocabularies can completely meet this need if taken independently. In this paper, we present a new version of Metadata vocabulary for Ontology Description and publication, referred as MOD 1.2 which succeeds previous work published in 2015. It has been designed by reviewing in total 23 standard existing metadata vocabularies (e.g., Dublin Core, OMV, DCAT, VoID) and selecting relevant properties for describing ontologies. Then, we studied metadata usage analytics within ontologies and ontology repositories. MOD 1.2 proposes in total 88 properties to serve both as (i) a vocabulary to be used by ontology developers to annotate and describe their ontologies, or (ii) an explicit OWL vocabulary to be used by ontology libraries to offer semantic descriptions of ontologies as linked data. The experimental results show that MOD 1.2 supports a new set of queries for ontology libraries. Because MOD is still in early stage, we also pitch the plan for a collaborative design and adoption of future versions within an international working group.

Harnessing the Power of Unified Metadata in an Ontology Repository: The Case of AgroPortal

“…We previously conducted a similar smaller study [48] and came to similar outcomes. Another one was conducted by Tejo-Alonso et al [35]: Their study consisted of total 23 RDFS/OWL metadata vocabularies (the "most popular from prefix.cc"): They were especially interested in how much the metadata vocabularies are themselves described with proper metadata properties.…”

“…To get a sense of the quantity and origin of existing metadata vocabularies actually used by ontology developers, we downloaded and semi-automatically analyzed 1107 OWL ontologies taken from different sources: 594 from NCBO BioPortal, 53 from AgroPortal, 260 from MMI Ontology Registry and Repository, 97 from the OBO Foundry, 82 from DERI Vocabularies, and 21 from ProtégéWiki. 7 Once ontology duplicates removed-by matching name or base URIs-we obtained a corpus of 805 ontologies. Because of the sources of the ontologies, this corpus is slightly influenced by certain domains (biomedicine, biology, agronomy, environment); although it might bias the results, we are still confident they are quite representative, especially in these domains.…”

“…• However, the presence of OMV-and omvmmi complement to OMV-is mostly explained by the important number of ontologies taken from the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository that has adopted and enforced OMV in the ontologies hosted on their repository. In a previous similar study on 222 ontologies [48], which does not include MMI ontologies but included 61 ontologies randomly selected via Google, OMV was completely absent. This clearly illustrates the impact of harmonized community practices (or repository enforcement) on ontology metadata.…”

“…2 They are often not maintained anymore, sometimes very specific or too general and of course, they are rarely aligned one another despite their significant overlaps. Furthermore, there have been several ontology repository projects that did not also take the problem seriously enough to support the description of their ontologies with standard vocabularies [7,8]. With the exception of the Linked Open Vocabularies registry [9,10], the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository [11], and to some extent, the NCBO BioPortal [12], the question of harmonization and standardization of ontology descriptions have not really been a central matter, although this is changing now (e.g., the OBO Foundry community metadata effort).…”

An Ontology for Transportation System

“…and within each mode of transport there were different options available. We have followed the DERA( Domain, Entity, Relation, Attribute) methodology [8,9,10] to construct the ontology and enabled ontology reusue by following the Metadata for Ontology Description and Publication (MOD) [11] standards.…”