Ontology in support of Linked-Data API for Networked DRoneS developed as part of a Sloan Foundation funded effort to improve scientific data collection and interoperability for unmanned vehicles used for scientific data collection. This work is primarily being developed at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Center for Research Computing, Laboratory for Assured AI Applications Development (LA3D) and at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
This ontology is developed using a FAIR methodology follows "Best Practices for Implementing FAIR Vocabularies and Ontologies on the Web", "Ten simple rules for making a vocabulary FAIR", and FAIRsFAIR "D2.5 FAIR Semantics Recommendations Second Iteration". We have adopted the use of Permanent Identifiers for the Web w3id as recommended by the best practices documents. Documentation is automatically generated from the RDF Ontology Document metadata using the WIzard for DOCumenting Ontologies (Widoco). Drone uses the best practices checklist of vocabularies to facilitate rendering of metadata into documentation.
Ontology is modeled using RDFS-Plus level of axiomatization with W3C RDFS Schema and selected W3C OWL 2 Constructs. Additionally, to facilitate alignment and adoption using schema.org level base vocabularies as outlined in the schema.org developer documentation. This ontology is developed using Modular Ontology Modeling Methodology using Ontology Design Patterns connected to form modules that build the larger ontology. Shape Constraints using W3C Shapes Constraint Language are also provided for graph shape validation as discussed in the SHACL and OWL document. Alignments are modeled similarly to the OGC Testbed-16: Aviation Engineering Report ontology development. Similarly, we directly import the W3C Provenance Ontology Prov-o, OGC development version of Geosparql 1.1, W3C OWL-time. In addition, we import the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Ontology to describe sensors and observations captured by scientific drones and parts of the Data Catalog Vocabulary Version 3 to facilitate dataset discovery and reuse.
Development of Drone uses Github Actions to perform CI/CD of the ontology. It runs a SHACL test suite against sample knowledge graph fragments using pyshacl and the sharness Test Anything Protocol. Results can be reviewed in the actions page of the Drone Ontology Github repository.
This ontology uses w3id.org persistent identifiers for namespaces. The rules for dereferencing the ontology using content-negotiation can be found in the doc/w3id subdirectory.
| Prefix | URI | Description |
|---|---|---|
| @prefix drone | https://w3id.org/drone/ont/ | Drone Core Ontology |
| @prefix dronesh | https://w3id.org/drone/shapes/shacl/ | Drone SHACL Shapes |
| Prefix | URI | Description |
|---|---|---|
| @prefix prov | http://www.w3.org/ns/prov# | W3C Provenance Ontology |
| @prefix sosa | http://www.w3.org/ns/sosa/ | Semantic Sensor Network Ontology |
| @prefix sdo | https://schema.org/ | Schema.org |
| @prefix skos | http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# | W3C Simple Knowledge Organization System |
| @prefix time | http://www.w3.org/2006/time# | W3C Owl Time |
| @prefix qudt | http://qudt.org/schema/qudt/ | Quantities, Units, Dimensions and Time Ontology |
| @prefix geosparql | http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql | OGC Geosparql Spatial Ontology |
| @prefix dcterms | http://purl.org/dc/terms/ | Dublin Core Terms |
| @prefix vann | http://purl.org/vocab/vann/ | Vocabulary for annotating vocabulary terms |
| @prefix cpannotationschema | http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl# | ODP annotations |
| @prefix gs1 | http://gs1.org/voc/ | GS1 Web Vocabulary |
The latest version of the full ontology can be found at https://w3id.org/drone/ont/ and specific release versions can be found at https://w3id.org/drone/ont/{version number}/, for example https://w3id.org/drone/ont/0.1.0.
Please use this GitHub repository's Issue tracker to request new terms/classes or report errors or specific concerns related to the ontology.
We acknowledge the Sloan Foundation for support in development of this ontology and for funding to create prototype software and science drone reference designs based upon using this ontology.
Charles Vardeman
Research Assistant Professor
Center for Research Computing, University of Notre Dame
cvardema@nd.edu
Github: charlesvardeman
ORCID: 0000-0003-4091-6059