SNaP Ontologies

Simple News and Press Ontologies

Created by Press Association, now known as PA Media, and hosted by IPTC with permission from PA Media

Authors: Jarred McGinnis; Paul Wilton; Paul Harman; John O'Donovan

Abstract

The news ontology is comprised of several ontologies, which describe assets (text, images, video) and the events and entities (people, places, organisations, abstract concepts etc.) that appear in news content. The asset model is the representation of news content as digital assets created by a news provider (e.g. text, images, video and data such as csv files). The domain model is the representation of the 'real world' which is the subject of news. There are simple entities, which we have labelled with the amorphous term of 'stuff' and complex entities. Currently, the only complex entity the ontology is concerned with is events. The term stuff has been used to include abstract and intangible concepts (e.g. Feminism, Love, Hate Crime etc.) as well as tangible things (e.g. Lord Ashdown, Fiat Punto, Queens Park Rangers).
Assets (news content) are about things in the world (the domain model). The connection between assets and the entities that appear in them is made using tags. Assets are further holistically categorised using classification schemes (e.g. IPTC Media Topic Codes, Schema.org Vocabulary or Press Association Categorisations).
The Identifier ontology lets us map resource URIs with legacy identifiers that exist under some authority (these maybe non-uri based).

For each ontology documented, requesting the ontology with .rdf or .ttl at the end of the URL will return the RDF/XML or Turtle representation. Clicking on the overview diagram below will open a larger diagram showing how all the ontologies work together.

License

All ontologies are currently licensed under this Creative Commons license