1. Self-Descriptiveness of
Ontologies
Fariz Darari

2. A Good Ontology
Must Be Self-Descriptive!
When someone uses a term from the ontology,
she must be able to find out the real meaning
of the term by following/dereferencing its URI.

3. Example:
<http://purl.org/dc/terms/license>
<http://example.org/thisDocument> <http://example.org/cc-by>
Icons by:
David Vignoni - http://www.icon-king.com/
Yingjunjiu - http://yingjunjiu.deviantart.com

4. The example showed that this document’s
license is CC-BY.
The example uses the term license from the
Dublin Core ontology, meaning:
“A legal document giving official permission to
do something with the resource.”

5. Oh yeah?
For sure, because when I dereferenced the URI:
http://purl.org/dc/terms/license
I got exactly this description:
PS: Yes, DC ontology is a good one :)

6. OK, I believe you now!
Icon: VistaICO.com - http://www.vistaico.com

7. What about the other ontologies?
• FOAF
• OWL
• dbpprop (DBpedia)
• geo
• BIBO (Books)
• VoID (Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets)

8. FOAF
Example term:
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows
Dereference result:

9. OWL
Example term:
http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#equivalentClass
Dereference result:

10. dbpprop
Example term:
http://dbpedia.org/property/country
Dereference result:

11. geo
Example term:
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#latitude
Dereference result:

12. BIBO
Example term:
http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/chapter
Dereference result:

13. VoID
Example term:
http://vocab.deri.ie/void#Dataset
Dereference result: