ontologics

Overview

The ontologics package provides tools to build and work with an ontology of linked (open) data in a tidy workflow. In the current workflow, the data are only available at the three-star level in comma-separated values tables or an R-optimized *.rds file of such a table.

The type of ontology is inspired by the FAO caliper platform and uses the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS).

An ontology is any data structure that stores the concept of any knowledge field in a linked way. It is typically built on a set of standardized/harmonized terms that have a clear definition and potentially some attributes. According to the SKOS, concepts can have semantic relations or can be mapped to one another. Semantic relations describe how harmonized concepts relate to one another, and mappings describe which concepts from different vocabularies should be linked.

The key tasks beyond creating a formally valid ontology are extracting concepts and their relation to other concepts and mapping new concepts to an existing ontology to capture and set potentially deviating definitions into relation.

Installation

Install the official version from CRAN:

install.packages("ontologics")

Install the latest development version from github:

devtools::install_github("luckinet/ontologics")

Read the vignettes Create an ontology, Map new concepts and Convert Ontology to RDF.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by funding to Carsten Meyer through the Flexpool mechanism of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) (FZT-118, DFG) and members working on it were additionally supported by Freigeist funding of the Volkswagenstiftung and the BMBF GeoKur project.