The NHC-Ontology

Classes and properties of the NHC-Ontology for the semantic annotation of natural history collections


The NHC-Ontology (Natural History Collection Ontology) is an application ontology that extends the Darwin-Semantic Web (Darwin-SW) Ontology, an ontology to describe present-day biodiversity information, and serves to structure the entities in the content of natural history collections through semantic annotation. It connects to digitized manuscript scans with the Web Annotation Data Model

We integrate the Darwin Core and Darwin-SW for describing Biodiversity, and link to classes taken from NCIT, Uberon and Geonames.

The classes that are added to the Darwin-SW are described underneath with their identifier, a short description and an example. More information can be found on the github account: NHC-Ontology
Classes defined within the NHC-Ontology namespace:
nhc:Date, nhc:TaxonRank

Properties defined within the NHC-Ontology namespace:
nhc:taxonRank, nhc:belongsToTaxon, nhc:scientificNameAuthorship, nhc:additional, nhc:additionalOccurrence, nhc:additionalIdentification, nhc:verbatimEventDate, nhc:measuresOrDescribes.

Other additions to describe items within natural history collections:
nhc:FieldBook, nhc:Page (Description coming shortly)


Term Name: Date
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/Date
Type:Class
Definition: An identifier referring to a verbatim date in a field book. Once annotated, thte indentifier receives a label such as "Sept." or "18 March 1821".
Comment: Examples: date1 rdf:type nhc:Date, date1 rdfs:label "18 March 1821".
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: TaxonRank
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/TaxonRank
Type:Class
Definition: The rank of a taxonomical name, specified as an IRI.
Comment: Examples: species, family, order .... These can be defined in the namespace of the collection as use of taxonomical ranks can differ between historical collections.
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: taxonRank
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/taxonRank
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:Taxon
Definition: A property specifying the link between an instance of the class dwc:Taxon and the an instance of the class nhc:TaxonRank.
Comment: Examples: taxon1 nhc:taxonRank species
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: belongsToTaxon
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/taxonRank
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:Taxon
Definition: A property specifying the link between an instance of the class dwc:Taxon and the an instance of the class nhc:TaxonRank.
Comment: Examples: taxon1 nhc:taxonRank species
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: scientificNameAuthorship
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/scientificNameAuthorship
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:Taxon
Definition: A property linking an instance of the class dwc:Taxon to the publisher of the taxonomical name, also an IRI and preferrably one specified in the VIAF international authority file.
Comment: Examples: taxon1 nhc:scientificNameAuthorship viaf:45106482
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: additional
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/additional
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:Organism
Definition: A property linking an instance of the class dwc:Organism to either an additional occurrence or an additional identification.
Comment: Examples: organism1 nhc:additional identification1
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: additional Occurrence
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/additionalOcccurrence
Type:Property
subPropertyOf: http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/additional
Domain:dwc:Organism
Range:dwc:Occurrence
Definition: A property linking an instance of the class dwc:Organism to an additional occurrence.
Comment: Examples: organism1 nhc:additionalOccurrence occurrence1
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: additional Identification
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/additionalIdentification
Type:Property
subPropertyOf: http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/additional
Domain:dwc:Organism
Range:dwc:Identification
Definition: A property linking an instance of the class dwc:Organism to an additional occurrence.
Comment: Examples: organism1 nhc:additionalOccurrence occurrence1
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: verbatimEventDate
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/verbatimEventDate
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:Event
Range:nhc:Date
Definition: A predicate linking an instance of the class dwc:Event to an instance of the class nhc:Date.
Comment: Examples: event1 nhc:verbatimEventDate date1, date1 rdfs:label "march 1828"
Details:nhc-ontology
Term Name: measuresOrDescribes
Identifier:http://makingsense.liacs.nl/rdf/nhc/measuresOrDescribes
Type:Property
Domain:dwc:MeasurementOrFact
Range:uberon:0001062, ncit:C20189
Definition: A predicate linking an instance of the class dwc:MeasurementOrFact to an instance of a subclass of the uberon multi-species anatomy ontology, or a instance of a subclass of the 'property or attribute' class from the NCI Thesaurus.
Comment: Examples: measurementorfact1 nhc:measuresOrDescribes uberon:0010166
Details:nhc-ontology