Modeling Guidelines
The following guidelines result from best practices and are to establish a common approach to constructing the models.
Named Graphs
- Ontologies are levelled graphs with names that have the structure: “prefixNumberName”, where prefix is typically a 2 character code such as “oe” or “us”, the number part is a specificity level, lower numbers being more general and “Name” is the domain-specific part for the graph;
- Named Graphs may contain statements that have resources across multiple namespaces;
Name Rules
- All Classes and Instances are in Upper CamelCase
- All properties are in lower CamelCase
- All Government Bodies are abbreviated to a well-known (or new) acronym. For example “FAA” and “DOT”.
- Government Bodies that are a sub-organization of another Government Body carry the abbreviation of that body as a prefix field separated by a hyphen. For example the DHS has an “Office of Health Affairs”. Because it is always a sub-organization of DHS it is named “DHS-OHA”. On the other hand, the Coast Guard is more of an independent body and there does not have the “DHS-” prefix, but is simply “CG”.
Identifiers
- URIs do not include file extension, e.g. “owl”, “rdf”
- Base URIs have no “#” or file extension
- An Identifier has a definite description grammar as documented on this [TBD] page.
Classes
- All Class names are in Upper CamelCase
- Classes are always expressed in the Singular
- See “Names” for more naming rules
- All properties are expressed as OWL Axioms
Instances
- All Instance names are in Upper CamelCase
- Instances are allowed to be of multiple types
- See “Names” for more naming rules
Properties
- All property names are in lower CamelCase
- Silent “has” rule: assume a “has” prefix for all noun properties
- See “Names” for more naming rules