The FAO geopolitical ontology is an ontology developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to describe, manage and exchange data related to geopolitical entities such as countries, territories, regions and other similar areas.

Definitions and examples

An ontology is a kind of dictionary that describes information in a certain domain using concepts and relationships. It is often implemented using OWL (Web Ontology Language), an XML-based standard language that can be interpreted by computers. * A ''Concept'' is defined as abstract knowledge. For example, in the geopolitical ontology a

non-self-governing territory Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter defines a non-self-governing territory (NSGT) as a territory "whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government". In practice, an NSGT is a territory deemed by the United Nations Gene ...

and a geographical group are concepts. Concepts are explicitly implemented in the ontology with individuals and classes: ** An ''individual'' is defined as an object perceived from the real world. In the geopolitical domain Ethiopia and the least developed countries group are individuals. ** A ''class'' is defined as a set of individuals sharing common properties. In the geopolitical domain, Ethiopia, Republic of Korea and Italy are individuals of the class ''self-governing'' territory; and least developed countries is an individual of the class ''special group''. * Relationships between concepts are explicitly implemented by: ** ''

Object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ai ...

properties'' between individuals of two classes. For example, ''has member'' and ''is in group'' properties, as shown in Figure 1. ** ''

Datatype In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most progra ...

properties'' between individuals and literals or XML datatypes. For example, the individual Afghanistan has the datatype property ''CodeISO3'' with the value "AFG". ** ''Restrictions'' in classes and/or properties. For example, the property ''official English name'' of the class ''self-governing'' territory has been restricted to have only ''one'' value, this means that a self-governing territory (or country) can only have one internationally recognized official English name. The advantage of describing information in an ontology is that it enables to acquire domain knowledge by defining hierarchical structures of classes, adding individuals, setting object properties and datatype properties, and assigning restrictions.

FAO ontology

The geopolitical ontology provides names in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian) and identifiers in various international coding systems ( ISO2, ISO3, AGROVOC,

FAOSTAT The Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) website disseminates statistical data collected and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAOSTAT data are provided as a time-series from 1961 in mo ...

FAOTERM
GAUL, UN, UNDP and DBPediaID codes) for territories and groups. Moreover, the FAO geopolitical ontology tracks historical changes from 1985 up until today; provides geolocation (geographical coordinates); implements relationships among

countries A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state (polity), state, nation, or other polity, political entity. It may be a sovereign state or make up one part of a larger state. For example, the country of Japan is an independent, so ...

and countries, or countries and groups, including properties such as ''has border with'', ''is predecessor of'', ''is successor of'', ''is administered by'', ''has members'', and ''is in group''; and disseminates country statistics including country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP or population. The FAO geopolitical ontology provides a structured description of data sources. This includes: source name, source identifier, source creator and source's update date. Concepts are described using the Dublin Core vocabulary (http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/description). In summary, the main objectives of the FAO geopolitical ontology are: * To provide the most updated geopolitical information (names, codes, relationships, statistics) * To track historical changes in geopolitical information * To improve information management and facilitate standardized data sharing of geopolitical information * To demonstrate the benefits of the geopolitical ontology to improve interoperability of corporate information systems It is possible to download the FAO geopolitical ontology i
OWL
an
RDF
formats. Documentation is available in the FAO Country Profilesbr>Geopolitical information
web page.

Features of the FAO ontology

The geopolitical ontology contains : *Area types: **Territories: self-governing, non-self-governing,

disputed Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...

, other. **Groups: organizations,

geographic Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and ...

, economic and special groups. *Names (official, short and names for lists) in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. *International codes: UN code – M49, ISO 3166 Alpha-2 and Alpha-3, UNDP code, GAUL code, FAOSTAT, AGROVOC FAOTERM and DBPediaID. *Coordinates: maximum latitude, minimum latitude, maximum longitude, minimum longitude. *Basic country statistics: country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP, population. *Currency names and codes. *Adjectives of nationality. *Relations: **Groups membership. **Neighbours (land border), administration of non-self-governing. **Historic changes: predecessor, successor, valid since, valid until.

Implementation into OWL

The FAO geopolitical ontology is implemented in OWL. It consists of classes, properties, individuals and restrictions. Table 1 shows all classes, gives a brief description and lists some individuals that belong to each class. Note that the current version of the geopolitical ontology does not provide individuals of the class "disputed" territories. Table 2 and Table 3 illustrate datatype properties and object properties.

Geopolitical ontology in Linked Open Data

The FAO Geopolitical ontology is embracing the W3C Linked Open Data (LOD) initiative and released its RDF version of the geopolitical ontology in March 2011. The term 'Linked Open Data' refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. The key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs, HTTP and RDF. The RDF version of the geopolitical ontology is compliant with al
Linked data principles
to be included in th
Linked Open Data cloud
as explained in the following.

Resolvable http:// URIs

Every resource in the OWL format of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has a unique URI. Dereferenciation was implemented to allow for three different URIs to be assigned to each resource as follows: * URI identifying the non-information resource * Information resource with an RDF/XML representation * Information resource with an HTML representation In addition the current URIs used for OWL format needed to be kept to allow for backwards compatibility for other systems that are using them. Therefore, the new URIs for the FAO Geopolitical Ontology in LOD were carefully created, using “Cool URIs for Semantic Web” and considering other good practices for URIs, such as DBpedia URIs.

New URIs

The URIs of the geopolitical ontology need to be permanent, consequently all transient information, such as year, version, or format was avoided in the definition of the URIs. The new URIs can be accessed at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/ For example, for the resource “Italy” the URIs are the following: ;http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy : identifies the non-information resource. ;http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data/Italy : identifies the resource with an RDF/XML representation. ;http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy :identifies the information resource with an HTML representation. In addition, “owl: sameAs” is used to map the new URIs to the OWL representation.

Dereferencing URIs

When a non-information resource is looked up without any specific representation format, then the server needs to redirect the request to information resource with an HTML representation. For example, to retrieve the resource “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Italy), which is a non-information resource, the server redirects to the HTML page of “Italy” (http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/page/Italy).

At least 1000 triples in the datasets

The total number of triple statements in FAO Geopolitical Ontology is 22,495. At least 50 links to a dataset already in the current LOD Cloud: FAO Geopolitical Ontology has 195 links t
DBpedia
which is already part of the LOD Cloud.

Access to the entire dataset

FAO Geopolitical Ontology provides the entire dataset as a RDF dump. It is available at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/data The RDF version of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has been already registered in CKAN (http://ckan.net/package/fao-geopolitical-ontology) and it was requested to add it into the LOD Cloud.

Example of use

The FAO Country Profiles is an information retrieval tool which groups the FAO's vast archive of information on its global activities in agriculture and rural development in one single area and catalogues it exclusively by country. The FAO Country Profiles system provides access to country-based heterogeneous data sources. By using the geopolitical ontology in the system, the following benefits are expected:Integrating country-based heterogeneous data at the United Nations: FAO's geopolitical ontology and services.
/ref> * Enhanced system functionality for content aggregation and synchronization from the multiple source repositories. * Improved information access and browsing through comparison of data in neighbor countries and groups. Figure 3 shows a page in the FAO Country Profiles where the geopolitical ontology is described.

References

External links

Geopolitical ontology in OWL formatGeopolitical ontology in RDF formatGeopolitical information in the FAO Country ProfilesFAO’s Geopolitical Ontology and Services
(Slides about FAO's geopolitical ontology)
FAO Country ProfilesFAO Terminology
(FAOTERM)
FAOSTATISO - Maintenance Agency for ISO 3166 country codes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geopolitical Ontology Ontology Ontology (information science) Knowledge representation Country codes Geographic data and information