The FAO geopolitical ontology is an

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...

developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to describe, manage and exchange data related to

geopolitical Geopolitics (from Greek γῆ ''gê'' "earth, land" and πολιτική ''politikḗ'' "politics") is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to ...

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 Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes (), which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers a ...

(Web Ontology Language), an

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

-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, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

and the least developed countries 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, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its ea ...

and

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

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

datatypes. For example, the individual

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...

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 Domain knowledge is knowledge of a specific, specialized discipline or field, in contrast to general (or domain-independent) knowledge. The term is often used in reference to a more general discipline—for example, in describing a software engin ...

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 AGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. By November 2021 ...

, FAOSTAT
FAOTERM

GAUL Gaul ( la, Gallia) was a region of Western Europe first described by the Romans. It was inhabited by Celtic and Aquitani tribes, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy (only during ...

, UN,

UNDP The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)french: Programme des Nations unies pour le développement, PNUD is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human dev ...

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. DBpedia allows users to semanti ...

ID codes) for territories and groups. Moreover, the

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)french: link=no, Organisation des Nations unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture; it, Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite per l'Alimentazione e l'Agricoltura is an intern ...

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

geolocation Geopositioning, also known as geotracking, geolocalization, geolocating, geolocation, or geoposition fixing, is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object. Geopositioning yields a set of geographic coordinates ...

(geographical coordinates); implements relationships among countries 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 Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period by countries. Due to its complex and subjective nature this measure is ofte ...

population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...

. 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 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

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 Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...

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 defi ...

corporate A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and r ...

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 are composed by four components: task, people ...

It is possible to download the FAO geopolitical ontology i
OWL
an
RDF
formats. Documentation is available in the

FAO Country Profiles The FAO Country Profiles are a multilingual web portal which repackages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) information archive on its global activities in agriculture and food security in a single area and catalog ...

br>Geopolitical information
web page.

Features of the FAO ontology

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

self-governing __NOTOC__ Self-governance, self-government, 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 form of ...

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

organizations An organization or organisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is an entity—such as a company, an institution, or an association—comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose. The word is derived from ...

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 An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...

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 ISO 3166 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions (e.g., ...

Alpha-2 and Alpha-3, UNDP code,

code, FAOSTAT,

FAOTERM and

ID. *Coordinates: maximum

latitude In geography, latitude is a 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 the south pole to 90° at the north pol ...

, 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 lette ...

, 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 usually defined as geographical boundaries, imposed either by features such as oceans and terrain, or by political entities such as governments, sovereign states, federated states, and other subnational entities. Political borders c ...

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

Implementation into OWL

The

geopolitical ontology is implemented in

. 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 In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...

(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 In data science, sameAs or exactMatch is a method of indicating that the subject of, or entity represented by, two resources is considered to be one and the same thing. It is a key part of the Semantic Web. Uses The concept of sameAs exists in ...

” 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

is an information retrieval tool which groups the FAO's vast archive of information on its global activities in

agriculture Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people t ...

and

rural development Rural development is the process of improving the quality life and economic well-being of people living in rural areas, often relatively isolated and sparsely populated areas. Rural development has traditionally centered on the exploitation of ...

in one single area and catalogues it exclusively by country. The

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

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