One of the common questions I hear in the semantic technology communities is why continue to create new ontologies (within the enterprise) and not re-use public domain ontologies and upper ontologies to model most domains. I will attempt to answer this, again from a practical and enterprise technical architecture viewpoint.

The SNaP news ontology includes a basic Stuff domain model for modeling real world entities so they can be annotated against news assets (stories etc).
Now there are many cases where you might want to use an existing specialised rich domain model to semantically annotate your news assets with, using an ontology that your consumers already may understand.

The nice guys at the BBC have migrated the sport ontology onto a neutral domain. This is a great move that will encourage wider adoption of the ontology, as it means sport content providers   can now publish sport RDF in a more pallatable way for their consumers.

The Press.Net news ontology is a lightweight set of 5 smaller ontologies that combine to provide a model for representing news assets in RDF, classified and annotated with real world concepts. I have put together some simple examples to demonstrate their use.

This is a brief guide to pragmatic ontology design. It is borne out of practical experience of designing ontologies for real world semantic publishing applications. It borrows design principles from good traditional software architecture techniques applying them to ontology design. It discusses the concepts that I will call the 3 C’s of ontology engineering..

When I was working on the BBC semantic publishing platform I was involved in the design of the BBC Sport Ontology. This has subsequently been accepted into the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV). I thought it would be useful to draw up a full data model diagram of the ontology so it can be visualized in all its glory..