Note
The OxPoints ontology defines OxPoints-specific terms.
OxPoints contains two broad classes of things:
- organizations (colleges, departments, faculties, etc.)
- places (sites, buildings, rooms, etc.)
Our definition of an organization is taken from the W3C Organization Ontology:
Represents a collection of people organized together into a community or other social, commercial or political structure. The group has some common purpose or reason for existence which goes beyond the set of people belonging to it and can act as an Agent. Organizations are often decomposable into hierarchical structures.
Note
Because organizations are groups they don’t have any physical manifestion (e.g., they don’t have spatial co-ordinates). In general parlance we often conflate a department and the building it occupies (“Where is the Department of Statistics?”), relying on context to make it clear that we’re talking about a building. In OxPoints, the distinction between organization and the places it occupies is made explicit. You’ll want to use the org:hasPrimarySite and org:hasSite relationships to go from an organization to the places it occupies.
Organizations can have the following attributes:
- addresses (specifically, a postal address — this should not be presented to a user when they want to visit one of the organization’s buildings)
- social media account names
- telephone and fax numbers
- various identifiers, both internal to the University, and externally assigned
Organizations are arranged into a hierarchy using the org:subOrganizationOf relation. It’s thus possible to find all units of the University by traversing the tree of sub-organization relationships.
Places are extents in physical space. They may be disjoint (e.g. a site divided by a road).
A place exists in OxPoints if it’s worthwhile to be able to refer to it. Thus, “the bit of the Manor Road Building occupied by the Oxford Institute of Aging” is a reasonable definition of a place that might exist in OxPoints.
Like organizations, places are arranged into a tree, this time using the spatialrelations:within relationship.
Note
At the moment, OxPoints does not support a place being directly contained by more than one thing. Support for this is planned, which will enable us to model the following cases: