Ontologies
An ontology – in the context of computer and information sciences – can be defined as a formal specification designed to delimit and group instances/concepts (facts, events, entities, elements, etc.) based on their common class (types, properties, interrelationships, etc.), and thus formalising a full or a subset of a domain.
The Common Data Model (CDM) is the formal description of the EU institution's official documents, legislative decision-making process, and its related publications.
More specifically, the CDM describes documents in the legal domain (e.g., the Official Journal, case law, consolidated legislation, preparatory acts, etc.), general publications (e.g., reports, periodical serials, books, brochures, etc.), the different entities related to their creation (e.g., the agent who wrote the document, the procedure and event of which it is the result, etc.), and their relations.
The model is based on the FRBR methodology which is well suited to describe multilingual and multiformat publications.
The CDM is an ontology described in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and it governs the respective document metadata instances in the Common Repository (Cellar). Its documentation can be obtained by dereferencing the ontology URI http://publications.europa.eu/ontology/cdm.
This model is continually refined in collaboration with the business units to guarantee its quality with regards to the institutions’ needs for the structure of their metadata.
The ELI Draft Legislation Ontology (ELI-DL) is an independent extension of the core ELI ontology. It enables the semantic annotation of bills, or legislative projects pages published in the portals of Official Journals or Parliaments.
ELI Impact Ontology (ELI-I) is an extension to the ELI ontology that provides more comprehensive information about the impact analysis process, the impacts of modifying text and the updates to the consolidated version of the legislation in response to these changes.
The ELI (European Legislation Identifier) ontology defines a common data model for exchanging legislation metadata on the web. The primary users of the ELI model are the official legal publishers of EU Member States, and the model can also be used by other organisations.
ERA vocabulary is an ontology defined by the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) to describe the concepts and relationships related to the European railway infrastructure and the vehicles authorized to operate over it. The infrastructure portion contains the Implementation layer that represents the railway network as a number of operational points (OPs) connected with sections of line (SoLs), describing the following structural subsystems of the Union rail system: the infrastructure subsystem, the energy subsystem, the trackside control-command and signalling subsystem. It also contains the Topological layer where the network topological concepts are defined. The Railway Vehicle types portion contains the route compatibility check-related technical characteristics of vehicle types.
The author of ERA vocabulary is ERA and it is published by the Publications Office of the European Union on the EU Vocabularies website.
The EU Budget Vocabulary and its RDF serialisation are designed to facilitate the exchange, increase the understandability and foster the reusability of budgetary information published by the EU. The Vocabulary aims to increase government transparency by improving the availability, usability and understandability of the EU Budget.
EURIO (EUropean Research Information Ontology) conceptualises, formally encodes and makes available in an open, structured and machine-readable format data about resarch projects funded by the EU's framework programmes for research and innovation.
The European Learning Model can be used to capture the results of any non-formal and formal learning across Europe, as well as the validation of non-formal and informal learning. It is designed to provide a single format to describe certificates of attendance, examination results, degrees and diplomas, diploma supplements, professional certifications, employer recommendations and any other kind of claims that are related to learning.
The Euvoc ontology, published by the Publications Office of the European Union, supports the development of authority tables (Name Authority Lists or NALs), Eurovoc and EU corporate datasets. It contains a set of classes and properties enabling all the information to be expressed in multilingual format. It helps define relationships between terms and concepts across multiple domains, supporting interoperability and standardization across European Union documentation and databases. It also defines a set a commonly use properties (i.e: start date, end dates, status), and supports the reusability on common data (currencies, languages, countries).
The Euvoc ontology is maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union and disseminated on the EU Vocabularies website.