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INCITS MLO WG: Ontology Best Practices

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Mark Jensen edited this page Jan 15, 2021 · 3 revisions

This page is a working document for the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Ad Hoc Mid-Level Ontology (MLO) Working Group. The purpose is to provide a list of desiderata for evaluating and/or maintaining the quality of a mid-level ontology.

NB: This list is not intended to be exhaustive. The numerical ordering of the items is solely for the purpose of ease of reference in the discussion. If you have suggestions for additional items or want to discuss existing items, please use Issue #99.

Ontology Desiderata:

  1. Deprecation Policy: There should be a clearly stated deprecation policy. Rationale: this will enable independently-working developers to align data to a set of ontology URIs with confidence that the semantics of those URIs haven’t changed between versions.
  2. Principle of Consistent Difference: At every level of the class hierarchy, a single criterion should be used to differentiate between the classes at that level of the hierarchy. Rationale: make it clearer where to place a new class within the hierarchy and to avoid overlapping sibling classes insofar as possible.
  3. Single Inheritance: Each ontology class should be an asserted subclass of one and only one ontology class.
  4. Consistency: The ontology should be logically consistent (as checked by a reasoner).
  5. Axioms: Logical axioms connecting classes should be included where appropriate.
  6. Multi-Language Support: Human readable labels should be provided in multiple languages and use xsd language tags to increase ontology re-use and support queries.
  7. Documentation: There should be adequate documentation for the ontology, and it should be kept up to date.
  8. Term Annotations: Every term should be properly annotated to include, at a minimum, a label and textual definition. Named Individuals do not require definitions. In addition, one or more of the following annotations is encouraged: example of usage, elucidation, comment, definition source, and alternative labels.
  9. Ontology Annotations: The ontology should be annotated with, at minimum, a label, description, and version IRI. Ideally, ontology metadata will include relevant information for content or code licenses, copyright, and how or where to access.

Points 8 and 9 are currently being discussed on Issue #100.

Additional Resources

  1. "Best Practices of Ontology Development" White Paper (https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2019/05/30/nist-ai-rfi-cubrc_inc_002.pdf)
  2. OBO Foundry (http://www.obofoundry.org/principles/fp-000-summary.html)
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