ECCRO ontology guidelines

Naming conventions

1. Obey OBO Foundry naming conventions for both entities and properties.
2. This implies that properties be stated as if they were being used in a sentence complete with spaces between words (e.g., "A is 'funded by' B" NOT 'A fundingSource B")
3. To mitigate the problem that different ontologies use different naming conventions, where specification of an ECCRO term is necessary, an OBO foundry-style term will be created, with appropriate synonyms if needed. Otherwise, the entity or property from included ontologies will be used as is.

Ontology Reuse

1. If a term is available with a reasonable definition in any of the W3C or OBO Foundry ontologies use it!
   1. Remember that data properties are used for literal values (strings, numbers, etc.) while object properties relate one instance to another.
2. If multiple terms of the proper type (entity, data property, object property) are available, here is the order for which term to use:
   1. schema.org
   2. DCAT
   3. An OBO Foundry term
   4. Another W3C term
3. Use SKOS narrower/broader/etc. relationships to relate W3C, OBO Foundry and ECRRO terms as seems useful for harmonizing these ontologies.