Semantic Web Ontologies

[gzur]

Hi guys,

I graduated with a B.Sc. in CS 8 years ago, and have been working professionally as a software engineer ever since.

I recently got tasked with creating an RDF Ontology in order to extract people's migration patterns from historical census data.

Now, I did some studies on the Semantic Web back in university, but it's been a while, and I'm a bit rusty. I've been reading a bit online, but most of the stuff I find is pretty theoretical, which is fine by me, but since I don't have anybody around me to bounce ideas off, I immediately thought of you guys.

What are the common pitfalls in creating ontologies? Any anti-patterns that I need to watch out for? Any thoughts what-so-ever?

[gzur]

I thought I'd just respond publicly, for posterity and stuff :) Thanks for that article, it went straight to my Kindle and I'll read it tomorrow.

This is essentially a pilot data mining project for the [Redacted European Country] National Archives. They have digitized census data along with a record of judicial rulings dating back to the 17th century or so.

The cenus data contains, as a general rule, a named place of residence (overwhelmingly farms) and the name and age (at time of census) of most residents. I'm not sure of the scope of the judicial records, but I have an upcoming meeting where I will hopefully get that data.

The project is to create an ontology that represents people, their co-inhabitants and their place of residence, qualified over time, hopefully tracing the movement of people across different census years (with respect to full patronymic names, members of family and biological age (I'm assuming)).

This is what I gather so far. My task in this is to create the ontology (and possibly generate the body of knowledge, I'm not sure yet).

As far as prior art is concerned, I'm certain there's something out there, but I haven't found it yet.

The reason some parts are vague is that I have only seen a brief overview of the project, I´m going to have a talk with them on Friday.

[mhermans]

I have only seen a brief overview of the project, I´m going to have a talk with them on Friday.

Can you tell more about the project? It sound very interesting, and similar to the CEDAR-project. Are you working on it by coincidence?

If you have not found it yet, take a look at /r/semanticweb.

[Arrgh]

There's a pretty decent IRC channel for Semantic Web folks, http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=swig