20180417 Ontology Change Improvement Call

Date: 2018.04.17

Attendees: Marijane White, Christian Hauschke, Tatiana Walther, Muhammad Javed, Brian Lowe, Ralph O'Flinn, Juliane Schneider, Damaris Murry

Agenda: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/VIVO/2018-04-17+Ontology+Improvement+Call

Sprint 1

Our German sprint participants may have trouble joining the Sprint 1 meetings for timing reasons, they are happening at 7-8pm their time.

VIVO ontology & Ontologies.owl file update

VCARD ontology update (HomeWork):

laying the groundwork to update the VCARD ontology
Delivering a comparison file, a graph of things that need to be removed from vivo.owl, a graph of things that need to be added to vivo.owl, and a SPARQL query to find existing triples and replace them.
Brian Lowe notes that VIVO already has a mechanism for migration that can accept SPARQL queries and it will run them automatically and update the triples in the data. If it creates blank nodes, it will automatically generate identifiers.
The SPARQL query might be better done in Sprint 2.
Tatiana says we might need to add some constructs for things that no longer exist in VCARD.

Javed will be working on the preparation of modules for ontologies that are candidates for deletion.

MIRO paper: https://jbiomedsem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13326-017-0172-7
Christian and Anna are concerned that the MIRO recommendations are too extensive. There are some good ideas in it, however. Christian suggests we make a skeleton, forget the MUST and SHOULD categories.
Mike suggests we focus on Section A.
Christian notes we've already done some work that fits into Section C, and there are important and/or easy ideas in the other sections as well.
The first task is to collect the information that would need to be added. We should document the potential changes in Confluence and perhaps also JIRA.
Javed is wondering about existing VIVO ontology documentation.
We have a lot of links:
The ontology link from vivoweb.org goes to the OpenRIF community repository.
The VIVO-ISF link on the front page of openrif.org is broken.
We need to tie these together a bit more. Perhaps the ontology explorer needs to be linked from the ontology explorer.
MIRO investigation could be a potential Sprint 2 task.

Ralph is interested in this, has not done a local implementation, waiting to see where VIVO goes with it.
Javed is curious about what's different in the Humanities.
Ralph says VIVO doesn't cover a lot of the media types like music and painting. VIVO is very STEM-focused.
Damaris mentions that most people have more than one role, and things may have more than one type, so having a most specific type may not work. Duke has a long list of types that people have requested, and they have a local model. They looked initially for existing ontology, but didn't find enough overlap, so it's mostly local. The most common types are videos, paintings, musical performances, and theatrical productions. Duke also models events off of those works, such as performances or exhibits.
Ralph mentions photography and painting as well, studio books, etc. There are a lot of things that don't fit into the Journal Article category.
Juliane suggests DDI (turns out this is mostly about social science data).
Marijane recalls that OpenVIVO looked at the MARC relators back in 2016, which is mostly about agent roles.
Javed mentions the BIBFRAME and LD4L as well.
Marijane suggests that the LOV project at OKFN may help us find existing ontologies. She also remembers there is a Music Ontology, but it may be a bit too detailed.
Christian thinks we may be able to use IMDB identifiers.

Relevant links:

The VIVO-ISF ontology is an information standard for representing scholarly work.

Additional Resources