Social Participation Ontology: community documentation, enhancements and use examples
Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments. South America presents a prominent contextwith mixed culture and social predisposition. In 2012, civil, academic and governmental parties startedelaborating the \Common Vocabulary of Social Participation" (vcps from the Brazilian name VocabularioComum de Participa˘c~ao Social), as a public and online process. By May, 2013, rst reference documents werepublicized, together with a preliminary owl code, logos, and a diagram of a general \public consultation".The corais platform kept online records of the process, like discussions and preparation of texts. Thisarticle exposes this material and proposes an elementary unfolding: the \Social Participation Ontology" (opsfrom the Brazilian name Ontologia de Participa˘c~ao Social). To exhibit this new ontology, these steps wereconsidered: correction of ontological contradictions and owl protocol use errors; completion of vcps owlcode into a preliminary version of the ops; translations and standardizations; enhancements of class namesand labels in Portuguese, Spanish and English; a toy expansion of the ontology by further specifying classes;linked data examples regarding dereferencing, a sparql endpoint and participatory instances; use cases byresearchers and public managers. Ongoing work involves further adoption of ops by the ocial Brazilianfederal portal of social participation, further adoption by civil participatory organizations, and linkage toother participatory ontologies. ops is being used as an upper ontology, and all classes linked further to foafand bfo as higher upper ontologies.PACS numbers: 89.65-s,07.05.Bx,07.05.KfKeywords: OWL, semantic web, linked data, electronic democracy, participatory democracy, social systems