The FAO geopolitical ontology is an

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

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

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 Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

-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 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 Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

and the

least developed countries The least developed countries (LDCs) are developing countries listed by the United Nations that exhibit the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development. The concept of LDCs originated in the late 1960s and the first group of LDCs was listed b ...

group are individuals. ** A ''class'' is defined as a set of individuals sharing common properties. In the geopolitical domain,

Republic of Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

and

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

are individuals of the class ''self-governing'' territory; and

is an individual of the class ''special group''. * Relationships between concepts are explicitly implemented by: ** '' Object 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 collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these ...

properties'' between individuals and literals or

datatypes. For example, the individual

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...

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, FAOTERM,

GAUL Gaul () was a region of Western Europe first clearly described by the Roman people, Romans, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Italy. It covered an area of . Ac ...

, UN,

UNDP The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. The UNDP emphasizes on developing local capacity towar ...

and

DBPedia DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web using OpenLink Virtuoso. DBpedia a ...

ID codes) for territories and groups. Moreover, the

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; . (FAO) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition ...

geopolitical ontology tracks historical changes from 1985 up until today; provides

geolocation Geopositioning is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object or a person. Geopositioning yields a set of Geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) in a given map datum ...

(geographical coordinates); implements relationships among

countries A country is a distinct part of the Earth, world, such as a state (polity), state, nation, or other polity, political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, List of states with limited r ...

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 Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...

. 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 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

vocabulary 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 Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...

corporate A corporation or body corporate is an individual or a group of people, such as an association or company, that has been authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law as "born out of s ...

information systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems comprise four components: task, people, structu ...

It is possible to download the FAO geopolitical ontology in OWL and RDF formats. Documentation is available in the FAO Country Profiles Geopolitical information web page.

Features of the FAO ontology

The geopolitical ontology contains : *Area types: **Territories:

self-governing Self-governance, self-government, self-sovereignty or self-rule is the ability of a person or group to exercise all necessary functions of regulation without intervention from an external authority. It may refer to personal conduct or to any ...

, non-self-governing, disputed, other. **Groups:

organizations An organization or organisation ( Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is an entity—such as a company, or corporation or an institution (formal organization), or an association—comprising one or more people and having a par ...

, geographic,

economic An economy is an area of the Production (economics), production, Distribution (economics), distribution and trade, as well as Consumption (economics), consumption of Goods (economics), goods and Service (economics), services. In general, it is ...

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,

code, FAOSTAT, AGROVOC FAOTERM and

ID. *Coordinates: maximum

latitude In geography, latitude is a geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from −90° at t ...

, minimum

, maximum

longitude Longitude (, ) is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east- west position of a point on the surface of the Earth, or another celestial body. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees and denoted by the Greek lett ...

, minimum

. *Basic country statistics: country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP, population. *Currency names and codes. *Adjectives of nationality. *Relations: **Groups membership. **Neighbours (land

border Borders are generally defined as geography, geographical boundaries, imposed either by features such as oceans and terrain, or by polity, political entities such as governments, sovereign states, federated states, and other administrative divisio ...

), administration of non-self-governing. **Historic changes: predecessor, successor, valid since, valid until.

Implementation into OWL

The

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 all Linked data principles to be included in the 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 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”, which is a non-information resource, the server redirects to the HTML page of “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. The RDF version of the FAO Geopolitical Ontology has been already registered in CKAN 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 Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...

and

rural development Rural development is the process of improving the quality of life, quality of life and economic well-being of people living in rural areas, often relatively isolated and sparsely populated areas. Often, rural regions have experienced rural povert ...

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

* * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Geopolitical Ontology Ontology (information science) Knowledge representation Country codes Geographic data and information