Ontology

This version:
2012-11-07 - v0.5 [ n3 ]
History:
2011-10-04 - v0.4 [ n3 ]
2011-08-31 - v0.3 [ n3 ]
2011-08-01 - v0.2 [ n3 ]
2011-06-24 - v0.1 [ n3 ]
Authors:
Giuseppe Rizzo, Raphaël Troncy

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This copyright applies to the NERD Ontology and accompanying documentation in RDF. Regarding underlying technology, NERD uses W3C's RDF technology, an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.


Abstract

The NERD ontology is a set of mappings established manually between the taxonomies of named entity types. Concepts included in the NERD ontology are collected from different schema types: DBpedia ontology (for DBpedia Spotlight and Lupedia), lightweight taxonomies (for AlchemyAPI, Yahoo!, Wikimeta, and Zemanta) or simple flat type lists (for Extractiv, OpenCalais, Saplo, Semitags). The NERD ontology tries to merge the linguistic community needs and the logician community ones: we developed a core set of axioms based on the Quaero schema which define the NERD core and we mapped similar concepts described in the other scheme. The selection of these concepts has been done considering the greatest common denominator among them. The concepts that do not appear in the NERD namespace are sub-classes of parents that end-up in the NERD ontology. To summarize, a concept is included in the NERD ontology as soon as there are at least three extractors that use it.

Status of this Document

The NERD ontology has been evolving gradually since its creation in 2011. There is now a stable core of classes that will not be changed, beyond modest adjustments to their documentation to track implementation feedback and emerging best practices. New inferred axioms may be added at any time according to the extractors supported, and consequently this specification is an evolving work. The NERD namespace URI, by contrast, is fixed and its identifier is not expected to change. Furthermore, efforts are underway to ensure the long-term preservation of the http://nerd.eurecom.fr domain. Comments are very welcome, please send them to nerd@eurecom.fr. Thank you.

Table of Contents


1. NERD ontology at a glance

An alphabetical index of NERD terms, by class and by property (relationships, attributes), are given below. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.

Classes: AdministrativeRegion, Aircraft, Airline, Airport, Album, Ambassador, Amount, Animal, Architect, Artist, Astronaut, Athlete, Automobile, Band, Bird, Book, Bridge, Broadcast, Canal, Celebrity, City, ComicsCharacter, Company, Continent, Country, Criminal, Drug, EducationalInstitution, EmailAddress, Event, FictionalCharacter, Function, Holiday, Hospital, Insect, Island, Lake, Legislature, Lighthouse, Location, Magazine, Mayor, MilitaryConflict, Mountain, Movie, Museum, MusicalArtist, Newspaper, NonProfitOrganization, OperatingSystem, Organization, Park, Person, PhoneNumber, PoliticalEvent, Politician, Product, ProgrammingLanguage, RadioProgram, RadioStation, Restaurant, River, Road, SchoolNewspaper, ShoppingMall, SoccerClub, SoccerPlayer, Software, Song, Spacecraft, SportEvent, SportsLeague, SportsTeam, Stadium, Station, TVStation, TennisPlayer, Thing, Time, URL, University, Valley, VideoGame, Weapon, Website,

2. NERD ontology overview

The NERD ontology is composed of two building blocks: the NERD core and the NERD inferred axioms. The list of the NERD core classes is defined as:

These classes host bi-directional references to the classes defined by the vocabularies of the external extractors. These references follow the pattern of the equivalentClasse. For instance the NERD class Person is defined as an equivalentClass of the DBpedia ontology class Person. Below is reported the complete serialization of the nerd:Person class.


    nerd:Person a owl:Class ;
                          rdfs:subClassOf nerd:Thing ;
                          owl:equivalentClass opencalais:Person, semitags:person, saplo:Person, zemanta:person, extractiv:PERSON, yahoo:person,
                                                             alchemyapi:Person, wikimeta:PERS, dbpedia:Person .
    

The inferred NERD axioms are generated from the long-tail of the most frequent classes of the extractors involved in the NERD project. The nature of the relation among the generated NERD classes and the external ones is subClassOf. An exhaustive list of classes is defined in the next section.

3. NERD classes

Class: nerd:Amount

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Amount

equivalent-class:
http://www.wikimeta.com#AMOUNT
sub-class-of:
nerd:Thing

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Animal

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Animal

equivalent-class:
http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Animal
sub-class-of:
nerd:Thing

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Architect

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Architect

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Astronaut

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Astronaut

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Broadcast

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Broadcast

sub-class-of:
nerd:Organization

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Celebrity

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Celebrity

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:ComicsCharacter

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#ComicsCharacter

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:FictionalCharacter

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#FictionalCharacter

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Legislature

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Legislature

sub-class-of:
nerd:Organization

[back to top]

Class: nerd:Mayor

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#Mayor

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:NonProfitOrganization

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#NonProfitOrganization

sub-class-of:
nerd:Organization

[back to top]

Class: nerd:SoccerClub

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#SoccerClub

sub-class-of:
nerd:Organization

[back to top]

Class: nerd:SoccerPlayer

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#SoccerPlayer

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]

Class: nerd:TennisPlayer

URI: http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#TennisPlayer

sub-class-of:
nerd:Person

[back to top]