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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 cause of death and health issues triples.

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

The intended audience 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 vocabulary. 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>. If an external term's definition or use is not commensurate with a term in the CWRC ontology but its application in external datasets is such that it will be useful nevertheless to link those terms to ours, then the has functional relation predicate is employed to indicate that the relationship is specified semantically but may be leveraged for processing.

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. The Web Open Annotation data model is used to link the original Orlando text to specific Contexts.
  3. The SKOS vocabulary is used to represent taxonomic relationships and to fully document ontology terms.
  4. Some Dublin Core vocabulary terms are used for well known documentation tags.
  5. The CWRC ontology supplies relationships unique to CWRC.

b. Provenance and Contexts​

The Web Open Annotation data model is used to link the original Orlando text to specific Contexts for cause of death and health issues. More documentation to come about the way OA was used in this and other CWRC ontologies.

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 possible, the original Orlando XML tag equivalent is contained within the rdf:value tag of any term within the ontology.
  • 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​