INFX538 Autumn 2009

4.1 Reusing existing terms

A set of well-known vocabularies has evolved in the Semantic Web community. Please check whether your data can be represented using terms from these vocabularies before defining any new terms:

• Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF), vocabulary for describing people.
• Dublin Core (DC) defines general metadata attributes. See also their new domains and ranges draft.
• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC), vocabulary for representing online communities.
• Description of a Project (DOAP), vocabulary for describing projects.
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), vocabulary for representing taxonomies and loosely structured knowledge.
• Music Ontology provides terms for describing artists, albums and tracks.
• Review Vocabulary, vocabulary for representing reviews.
• Creative Commons (CC), vocabulary for describing license terms.
• The URIs are dereferenceable, meaning that a description of the concept can be retrieved from the Web. For instance, using the DBpedia URI http://dbpedia.org/page/Doom to identify the computer game Doom gives you an extensive description of the game including abstracts in 10 different languages and various classifications.
• The URIs are already linked to URIs from other data sources. For instance, you can navigate from the DBpedia URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin to data about Berlin provided by Geonames and EuroStat. Therefore, by using concept URIs form these datasets, you interlink your data with a rich and fast-growing network of other data sources.






A more extensive list of datasets with dereferenceable URIs is maintained by the Linking Open Data community project in the ESW Wiki.





Good examples of how terms from different well-known vocabularies are mixed in one document and how existing concept URIs are reused are given by the FOAF profiles of Tim Berners-Lee and Ivan Herman.