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Terms and Definitions

1. Introduction​

The Illness and Injury Ontology is the ontology used by the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory to assign names of illnesses and injuries to health problems and causes of death. It is designed to work with the main CWRC ontology or independently of it.

This human-readable version of the ontology accompanies the introduction to the ontology (see Introduction). The OWL ontology itself is the primary source for understanding how the ontology works.

The intended audiences of this document are scholars and practitioners who wish to understand how the ontology works and who intend to make use of this ontology.

2. Illness & Injury Ontological Structures​

a. Linkages to External Ontologies​

We employ a number of strategies for linking to other ontologies. Our architecture does not typically import other ontologies wholesale, but relates to large vocabularies in defined ways.

We adopt external namespaces and associated classes and terms wherever possible when they are in widespread use and their vocabularies are broadly compatible with ours, as in the case of the FOAF ontology. If an external ontology term aligns semantically with ours, then we use OWL- or SKOS-based relationships such as owl:equivalentClass, skos:narrower or skos:broader.

At the top level, the II ontology makes use of the following well known ontologies:

  1. The FOAF ontology for the representation of people and organizations.
  2. SKOS is used to represent taxonomic relationships and to fully document ontology terms.
  3. Some Dublin Core terms are used for well known documentation tags.
  4. The CWRC ontology supplies relationships unique to CWRC.

3. Illness & Injury Ontology Design Rules​

Beyond the formalism of The OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, the CWRC ontology follows the following design rules and styles:

  • The contents of rdfs:labels tags are always in lowercase, with the following exceptions:
    • Labels for religions, political affiliations and groups of people derived from a proper name will begin with an uppercase letter.
  • Whenever referencing a geographical location, use the most precise item within the database.
  • Definitions in French, English (and other serendipitously available languages) are never word-for-word translations, and are definitions in their own right.

4. Classes​

The ontology includes several embedded taxonomies for enumerating the categories associated with certain classes (e.g., political affiliation, religion, occupation). Where possible, the taxonomies are SKOS-based, or a combined OWL and SKOS approach.

5. Properties​