which ontology to use for projects, organisations and deliverables

[pvgenuchten]

Various ontologies exist to register projects, some research:

• although FOAF has a project term and a currentproject property, the definitions do not fit cordis, currentproject is only defined on persons, not on organizations.
• vcard does not have project references, but is used extensively on dcat
• the frapo is designed to manage organisations which fund or participate in projects, internally frapo uses FOAF to define organizations, frapo suggests fabio to be used to describe deliverables (reports, articles, datasets)
• the cordis ontology EURIO includes all aspects we aim to cover, funding, participation, deliverables, etc. it is based on dingo, euroscivoc and nuts
• DOAP ontology (as described in article is more related to software projects, it has a strong linkage to FOAF
• dingo describes grants and projects, and organizations which interact with projects through a role class (Takes_role). dingo does not define deliverables of a project, dingo:organisations are defined as closematch to foaf:organisations
• wikidata includes a project class, it may link to participants through team and funders through stakeholder
• schema.org/Project uses member to indicate participation of an organization (or person) and funding (as grant) to indicate funding options

[pvgenuchten]

Comment by TomasR:

• I would be in favour of moving the issue of metadata ontology into an ontology-specific repository. It seems like a boosting topic to me.
• I reviewed the research presented in the above issue. Many thanks for an exhaustive overview. Right now, I don't see anything valuable I may add on the top of this overview. In my opinion, we should come to a discussion and conclusions.

Comment by AnnaF:
Stay close to what is used in openaire/cordis/EOSC, because this is what our community expects

[ldesousa]

• The Plan class in the PROV-O ontology can be used for the concept of project. Defined as:

A plan is an entity that represents a set of actions or steps intended by one or more agents to achieve some goals.

But even the Activity class can be considered:

An activity is something that occurs over a period of time and acts upon or with entities; it may include consuming, processing, transforming, modifying, relocating, using, or generating entities.

• The DBPedia Ontology includes both the concepts of Project and ResearchProject, including many useful predicates for to describing funding, participants, coordination, etc.

• The VIVO ontology is quite elaborate, probably more so than EURIO, including the concept of Project, and aligning with sub-classes from OBO. Some aspects may be outdated, but worthy or review.

• A couple of years ago Simon Cox developed a light-weight ontology for CSIRO precisely called PROJECT. Even though it is not a W3C recommendation, it should be considered, there are fewer people more experimented in this field than Simon. This simple ontology could be the hook for alignment between those I refer above and EURIO.

[ldesousa]

It is important to keep in mind how the Semantic Web allows you to use all these ontologies together, not having to select one over the other. For instance:

<https://soilwise-he.eu/>
    a proj:ResearchProject,
      dbo:ResearchProject,
      vivo:Project,
      eurio:Project .