AKT Reference Ontology (Portal Ontology)
The AKT Reference Ontology has been designed to support the AKT-2 demonstrator ("AKTive Portal"), and subsequent activities. The ontology, designed by the AKT-2 group and codified by Enrico Motta, extends Version 1.
This notion comes from Cyc. It is useful to group together all information bearing entities, including video, audio and documents. An information bearing object may have an author (a generic agent) and may be owned by a legal agent. It is a tangible object
Information in general, independent of an object in which it is encoded. Whatever is transferred in an information-transfer event. It is clearly an intangible thing
Any kind of recorded audio, which is tangible. This also includes a audio file on a machine
Any kind of recorded video, which is tangible. This also includes a mpeg file on a machine
A publication is something which has one or more publication references. A publication can be both an article in a journal or a journal itself. The distinction between publication and publication-reference makes it possible to distinguish between multiple occurrences of the sam publication, for instance in different media
A publication which contains items which cane be themselves referenced through a publication reference. Composite publications include newspapers, magazines and journals. A book which is a collection of articles is a composite publication, a monograph is not
This used to be called periodical publication. However, many periodicals do not appear at fixed intervals, which is why librarians refer to them as serials. So, we now use the concept of serial publication and the has-periodicity slot has been removed
This comes from the ontolingua library. A periodical-publication is published regularly, such as once every week. Strictly speaking, the noun 'periodical' is used by librarians to refer to things published at intervals of greater than a day. We use the phase periodical-publication to include newspapers and other daily publications, since they share many bibliographic features. The periodicity indicates how often the publication comes out. Note that this is a duration, rather than a time interval. A time interval indicates a specific time interval on the time continuum, so we need to model periodicity as a time quantity
we have decided that a publication reference is an intangible, abstract information
This is a generic notion, an agent can be an organization, a person an animal, a software agent, etc
Some agents have legal status: definitely organizations and people, anybody else?
An organization is a type of legal agent
An organization which has a political connotation
We use EU guidelines to distinguish between different organization sizes
An organization with over 10000 employees
An organization with more than 250 employees
An organization with no more than 250 employees. It also has to be independent, i.e., less than 25% owned by one enterprise (or jointly by several enterprises) falling outside the definition of medium-sized enterprise. Finally, either the turnover total must be less than 40M Euros or the balance sheet total must be less than 27M Euros.
An organization with no more than 50 employees. It also has to be independent, i.e., less than 25% owned by one enterprise (or jointly by several enterprises) falling outside the definition of small-sized enterprise. Finally, either the turnover total must be less than 7M Euros or the balance sheet total must be less than 5M Euros.
An organization with no more than 10 employees. It also has to be independent, i.e., less than 25% owned by one enterprise (or jointly by several enterprises) falling outside the definition of micro-sized enterprise.
SME are important, so we define a class to represent them explicitly. In some case we might not know or we do not want to bother specifying excatly whether something is a small-organization or a medium-organization. Hence, we can just say 'x is a SME' without going into further detail.
An organization may have a number of units. Units may themselves have sub-units
A partnership is not necessarily a company, e.g. a consultancy firm is not a company
A generic class for locations. It includes both real and fantastic places
A geopolitical entity is a geographical area which is associated with some sort of political structure. For instance, Russia, Italy, The-city-of-Messina, etc. A geopolitical entity can be also seen as an agent - e.g., France declared war to Spain
A generic class for addresses, whether email or postal. We see an address as abstract information and therefore it is an intangible thing
Modified to allow addresses to be given as strings, with no structure
HPKB says that genders are intangible..Uhm...
A person which has an affiliation with some organization. For instance employees are affiliated to the organization they work for, students to the institution where they are studying, etc. A person can have multiple affiliations, which means that there is no constraint relating the values of slot has-affiliation-to-unit to the values of slot has-affiliation
People and in general even organizations and organization units may have research interests. This relation shoudl be used to specify them
This is a minimalist definition of class event. We start with the very basic and we will then add slots as we specialise this definition for specific classes of events. The fillers of slots has-other-agents-involved and has-main-agent should not intersect
The agents causing the event to happen, if they are known.
The location at which an event takes place
This is an event in which the main agent (plus maybe others) goes from some place to another
An event in which the main agent transfers something (the thing-acted-on, tangible or intangible) to one or more recipient agents. Note that we do not say anything about whether the original agent still retain the thing-acted-on. In some cases this is clearly true ('I pass my wisdom on to my daughter'), in other cases it is not (I give you my wallet).
The agents which receive the thing-acted-on
A generalized transfer in which information is passed from main agent to one or more recipient agents. Examples include giving a tutorial.
This is a generic class to catch all sorts of borderline and metaphorical ways to carry things from A to B
Something tangible designed to transport people, animals, objects from A to B. For instance a bycicle, a car, a boat, etc.
a generalized transfer in which information is passed from main agent to one or more recipient agents. examples include giving a tutorial.
A meeting type of event. Note that both attendee and organizer have multiple cardinality
Legal agents can be either organizations or people. An awarding body is normally an organization, an individual, or a bunch of people
An award is an intangible thing, even if the piece of paper which is often associated with an award is tangible. What about the virtual piece of paper in the virtual degree ceremony? I guess that ought to be an intangible
A generic class to specify generic areas for research or business initiatives. For instance, the area in which a project is situated
By technology we mean engineered applications of science. I guess we are probably confining ourselves to tangible things but as I am not sure I will use thing as the direct superclass - e.g., an algorithm is an intangible thing, but it could be seen as a technology, if we give a broad interpretation of the term
Merrian-Webster has a good set of definitions for a method. They say it is 'a systematic procedure, technique, or mode of inquiry employed by or proper to a particular discipline or art; a systematic plan followed in presenting material for instruction; a way, technique, or process of or for doing something; a body of skills or techniques'. This is very much also what we mean by method.
Whether the software is released, alpha or beta
A system which is accessible through the web
A web browser is not a web-based system!
It is sufficient that somebody in unit ?u works in project ?p