OWL file to describe entire opengov ontology

[joepio]

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a w3c standard for formally describing the structure of knowledge for a particular domain.

Having a .owl file has a couple of advantages:

• Documentation can be generated from the model. This could be used on the (currently non-existing) namespace page which the class and property IRI's direct to.
• Translations could easily be included in the ontology, which could increase adoption.
• It can be imported by others who want to extend or modify the popolo ontology for own use.
• It can generate JSON-LD context files.
• It serves as a clear, single source of truth.

I'd like to help create this. If I were to create an ontology that describes all of Popolo, would that be accepted in a pull request?

[jpmckinney]

Yes, certainly! Thanks for volunteering to do this, @joepsz

[DieterDePaepe]

@joepsz - great suggestion! Have you made any progress already for this?
I'm assisting the Flemish government on a project that might use this ontology, so we'll be sure to provide feedback if this gets released on time.

[joepio]

Working on it on a fork of this repo.

Cool to hear that the Flemish government might want to use this, @DieterDePaepe. I wasn't able to convince the Dutch Parliament to fully embrace popolo.

When making the ontology, I try to follow the documentation as close as possible, so don't expect any surprises in the ontology. However, I made it a bit more restrictive. For example, anything that should have a date string needs to be an xsd:dateTime, and a submitter prop needs to be of the type foaf:agent.

[akuckartz]

@joepio Thanks for working on this. If not yet done so consider joining https://www.w3.org/community/opengov/ That CG is currently not really active but that might change at any moment as a critical mass for Linked Data seems to exist now in this section of the Open Data world. Some of these issues might also be interesting to work on: https://github.com/OpenGovLD/specs/issues