Geopolitical ontology - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A geopolitical ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

is a mechanism to describe, manage and exchange data related to geopolitical entities such as countries, territories, regions and other similar areas.

Definitions and examples

An Ontology is a kind of dictionary that describes information in a certain domain using concepts and relationships. It is often implemented using OWL

Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

(Web Ontology Language), an XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

-based standard language that can be interpreted by computers.

A Concept is defined as abstract knowledge. For example, in the geopolitical ontology a non-self-governing territory
United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories
The United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories is a list of countries that, according to the United Nations, are non-decolonized. The list was initially prepared in 1946 pursuant to Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter, and has been updated by the General Assembly on recommendation...

or a geographical group are concepts. Concepts are explicitly implemented in the ontology with individuals and classes:
- An individual is defined as an object perceived from the real world. In the geopolitical domain Ethiopia
  Ethiopia
  Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
  
  or the least developed countries
  Least Developed Countries
  Least developed country is the name given to a country which, according to the United Nations, exhibits the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development, with the lowest Human Development Index ratings of all countries in the world...
  
  group are individuals.
- A class is defined as a set of individuals sharing common properties. In the geopolitical domain, Ethiopia
  Ethiopia
  Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
  
  , Republic of Korea or Italy
  Italy
  Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
  
  are individuals of the class self-governing territory; and least developed countries
  Least Developed Countries
  Least developed country is the name given to a country which, according to the United Nations, exhibits the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development, with the lowest Human Development Index ratings of all countries in the world...
  
  is an individual of the class special group.

Relationships between concepts are explicitly implemented by:
- Object
  Object (computer science)
  In computer science, an object is any entity that can be manipulated by the commands of a programming language, such as a value, variable, function, or data structure...
  
  properties between individuals of two classes. For example, has member and is in group properties, as shown in Figure 1.
- Datatype properties between individuals and literals or XML
  XML
  Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
  
  datatypes. For example, the individual Afghanistan
  Afghanistan
  Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
  
  has the datatype property CodeISO3 with the value "AFG".
- Restrictions in classes and/or properties. For example, the property official English name of the class self-governing territory has been restricted to have only one value, this means that a self-governing territory (or country) can only have one internationally recognized official English name.

The advantage of describing information in an ontology is that it enables to acquire domain knowledge by defining hierarchical structures of classes, adding individuals, setting object properties and datatype properties, and assigning restrictions.

FAO ontology

The geopolitical ontology, developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Fão

Fão is a town in Esposende Municipality in Portugal....

, provides names in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian) and identifiers in various international coding systems (ISO2

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization , to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest...

, ISO3

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization , to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest...

, AGROVOC

AGROVOC

AGROVOC was first developed in the 1980s as a multilingual structured thesaurus for all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains . Its main purpose was to standardize the indexing process for the AGRIS database in order to make searching simpler and more...

, FAOSTAT, FAOTERM, GAUL

Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL)

The Global Administrative Unit Layers is a spatial database of the administrative units for all the countries in the world. It is a project of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.-Mission:...

, UN, UNDP and DBPedia

DBpedia

DBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources,...

ID codes) for territories and groups. Moreover, the FAO

Fão

Fão is a town in Esposende Municipality in Portugal....

geopolitical ontology tracks historical changes from 1985 up until today; provides geolocation

Geolocation

Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a radar, mobile phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal...

(geographical coordinates); implements relationships among countries and countries, or countries and groups, including properties such as has border with, is predecessor of, is successor of, is administered by, has members, and is in group; and disseminates country statistics including country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP or population

Population

A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

.

The FAO geopolitical ontology provides a structured description of data sources. This includes: source name, source identifier, source creator and source's update date. Concepts are described using the Dublin Core

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...

vocabulary (http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/description).

In summary, the main objectives of the FAO geopolitical ontology are:

To provide the most updated geopolitical information (names, codes, relationships, statistics)
To track historical changes in geopolitical information
To improve information management and facilitate standardized data sharing of geopolitical information
To demonstrate the benefits of the geopolitical ontology to improve interoperability
Interoperability
Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...

of corporate information systems
Information systems
Information Systems is an academic/professional discipline bridging the business field and the well-defined computer science field that is evolving toward a new scientific area of study...

It is possible to download the FAO geopolitical ontology in OWL and RDF formats. Documentation is available in the FAO Country Profiles

FAO Country Profiles

The FAO Country Profiles is a multilingual web portal which repackages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations vast archive of information on its global activities in agriculture and food security in a single area and catalogues it exclusively by country and thematic areas.The...

Geopolitical information web page.

Features of the FAO ontology

The geopolitical ontology contains :

Area types:
- Territories: self-governing, non-self-governing
  United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories
  The United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories is a list of countries that, according to the United Nations, are non-decolonized. The list was initially prepared in 1946 pursuant to Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter, and has been updated by the General Assembly on recommendation...
  
  , disputed, other.
- Groups: organizations, geographic
  Subregion
  A subregion is a conceptual unit which derives from a larger region or continent and is usually based on location. Cardinal directions, such as south or southern, are commonly used to define a subregion.- United Nations subregions :...
  
  , economic
  Economic union
  An economic union is a type of trade bloc which is composed of a common market with a customs union. The participant countries have both common policies on product regulation, freedom of movement of goods, services and the factors of production and a common external trade policy.The countries...
  
  and special groups.

Names (official, short and names for lists) in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian.

International codes: UN code – M49, ISO 3166
ISO 3166
ISO 3166 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization . It defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions . The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation...

Alpha-2 and Alpha-3, UNDP code, GAUL
Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL)
The Global Administrative Unit Layers is a spatial database of the administrative units for all the countries in the world. It is a project of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.-Mission:...

code, FAOSTAT, AGROVOC
AGROVOC
AGROVOC was first developed in the 1980s as a multilingual structured thesaurus for all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains . Its main purpose was to standardize the indexing process for the AGRIS database in order to make searching simpler and more...

FAOTERM and DBPedia
DBpedia
DBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources,...

ID.

Coordinates: maximum latitude
Latitude
In geography, the latitude of a location on the Earth is the angular distance of that location south or north of the Equator. The latitude is an angle, and is usually measured in degrees . The equator has a latitude of 0°, the North pole has a latitude of 90° north , and the South pole has a...

, minimum latitude
Latitude
In geography, the latitude of a location on the Earth is the angular distance of that location south or north of the Equator. The latitude is an angle, and is usually measured in degrees . The equator has a latitude of 0°, the North pole has a latitude of 90° north , and the South pole has a...

, maximum longitude
Longitude
Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position of a point on the Earth's surface. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees, minutes and seconds, and denoted by the Greek letter lambda ....

, minimum longitude
Longitude
Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position of a point on the Earth's surface. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees, minutes and seconds, and denoted by the Greek letter lambda ....

.
Basic country statistics: country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP, population.
Currency names and codes.
Adjectives of nationality.

Relations:
- Groups membership.
- Neighbours (land border
  Border
  Borders define geographic boundaries of political entities or legal jurisdictions, such as governments, sovereign states, federated states and other subnational entities. Some borders—such as a state's internal administrative borders, or inter-state borders within the Schengen Area—are open and...
  
  ), administration of non-self-governing
  United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories
  The United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories is a list of countries that, according to the United Nations, are non-decolonized. The list was initially prepared in 1946 pursuant to Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter, and has been updated by the General Assembly on recommendation...
  
  .
- Historic changes: predecessor, successor, valid since, valid until.

Implementation into OWL

The FAO

Fão

Fão is a town in Esposende Municipality in Portugal....

geopolitical ontology is implemented in OWL

Web Ontology Language

. It consists of classes, properties, individuals and restrictions. Table 1 shows all classes, gives a brief description and lists some individuals that belong to each class. Note that the current version of the geopolitical ontology does not provide individuals of the class "disputed" territories. Table 2 and Table 3 illustrate datatype properties and object properties.

Geopolitical ontology in Linked Open Data

The FAO Geopolitical ontology is embracing the W3C Linked Open Data (LOD) initiative and released its RDF version of the geopolitical ontology in March 2011.
The term 'Linked Open Data' refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. The key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs, HTTP and RDF.

The RDF version of the geopolitical ontology is compliant with all Linked data principles to be included in the Linked Open Data cloud, as explained in the following paragraphs.

Resolvable http:// URIs:

Every resource in the OWL format of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has a unique URI. Dereferenciation was implemented to allow for three different URIs to be assigned to each resource as follows:
URI identifying the non-information resource
Information resource with an RDF/XML representation
Information resource with an HTML representation
In addition the current URIs used for OWL format needed to be kept to allow for backwards compatibility for other systems that are using them. Therefore, the new URIs for the FAO Geopolitical Ontology in LOD were carefully created, using “Cool URIs for Semantic Web” and considering other good practices for URIs, such as DBpedia URIs.

New URIs:

The URIs of the geopolitical ontology need to be permanent, consequently all transient information, such as year, version, or format was avoided in the definition of the URIs.
The new URIs can be accessed at
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/
For example, for the resource “Italy” the URIs are the following:
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy: identifies the non-information resource.
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data/Italy: identifies the resource with an RDF/XML representation.
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy: identifies the information resource with an HTML representation.
In addition, the “owl:sameAs” is used to map the new URIs to the OWL representation.

Dereferencing URIs:

When a non-information resource is looked up without any specific representation format, then, the server needs to redirect the request to information resource with an HTML representation.
For example, to retrieve the resource “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy), which is a non-information resource, the server redirects to the html page of “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy).

At least 1000 triples in the datasets:

The total number of triple statements in FAO Geopolitical Ontology is 22,495.
At least 50 links to a dataset already in the current LOD Cloud:
FAO Geopolitical Ontology has 195 links to DBpedia, which is already part of the LOD Cloud.

Access to the entire dataset:

FAO Geopolitical Ontology provides the entire dataset as a RDF dump. It is available at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data
The RDF version of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has been already registered in CKAN (http://ckan.net/package/fao-geopolitical-ontology) and it was requested to add it into the LOD Cloud.

Example of use

The FAO Country Profiles

FAO Country Profiles

is an information retrieval tool which groups the FAO's vast archive of information on its global activities in agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

and rural development

Rural development

Rural development in general denotes economic development and community development actions and initiatives taken to improve the standard of living in non-urban neighbourhoods, remote villages and the countryside...

in one single area and catalogues it exclusively by country.

The FAO Country Profiles

FAO Country Profiles

system provides access to country-based heterogeneous data sources. By using the geopolitical ontology in the system, the following benefits are expected:

Enhanced system functionality for content aggregation and synchronization from the multiple source repositories.
Improved information access and browsing through comparison of data in neighbor countries and groups.

Figure 3 shows a page in the FAO Country Profiles

FAO Country Profiles

where the geopolitical ontology is described.

External links

Geopolitical ontology in OWL format
Geopolitical ontology in RDF format
Geopolitical information in the FAO Country Profiles
FAO’s Geopolitical Ontology and Services (Slides about FAO's geopolitical ontology)
FAO Country Profiles
FAO Terminology (FAOTERM)
FAOSTAT
UN Statistics Division - M49 codes
ISO - Maintenance Agency for ISO 3166 country codes

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Definitions and examples

FAO ontology

Features of the FAO ontology

Implementation into OWL

Geopolitical ontology in Linked Open Data

Example of use

See also

External links