The collections ontology defines commonly used concepts for arrangements and schemes for organizing information and collections of things, such as structured collections that may be organized according to some scheme, and related very high level mereology relations to enable association of things with such collections and schemes.
The collections ontology conforms with the OWL 2 DL semantics, and is outside of OWL 2 RL due to the inclusion of a local some values constraint. This restriction may be removed as needed to support OWL RL rule-based applications that cannot be extended to support it.
This ontology was originally designed for use in the OMG Languages, Countries and Codes (LCC) specification as part of the broader LanguageRepresentation ontology. The concepts have also been used in the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) for representing collections such as baskets, portfolios records, statistical universes and populations, etc., and schemes such as classification schemes and identification schemes.
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systematic plan, manner, or method for making, doing, achieving, or organizing something
Examples include designs, schema, models, methodologies, alphabetical or numeric ordering, and the like.
grouping of things (may be zero) that have some shared significance
component of a substance, collection or combination of things
collection that has a clearly defined structure or organization
Examples include collections organized thematically, alphabetically, by method used do develop them, according to time and/or version, or based on encoding schemes such as the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress Subject Headings.
adheres to policies or rules specified in
includes, consists of, or contains, especially within a particular scope
Note that something can be comprised of something(s) that may or may not be understood as separable parts. In other words, comprises does not imply countability or uniqueness.
Being a constituent of something does not necessarily mean parthood. Whole-part relations are transitive, whereas constituency is not necessarily transitive and so this property is useful in cases where transitivity is not necessarily desirable or appropriate.
Note that the domain of hasMember should be some sort of collection, aggregate, or group. In the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), hasMember is used in the case of parties (people and organizations), whereas comprises can have anything in its range.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/
indicates any portion of something, regardless of whether the portion itself is attached to the remainder or detached; cognitively salient or arbitrarily demarcated; self-connected or disconnected; homogeneous or gerrymandered; material or immaterial; extended or unextended; spatial or temporal
Note that 'has part' is not a subproperty of 'comprises' in order to enable transitivity for whole-part relationships without limiting the use of cardinality constraints on comprises and membership.
A constituent may be an independently identifiable, discrete element or may be an indistinguishable element once it is combined with the target, such as a part of a substance.
relates something to another thing that it is some component or portion of, regardless of how that whole-part relationship is manifested
Note that 'is part of' is not a subproperty of 'isIncludedIn' in order to enable transitivity for whole-part relationships without limiting the use of cardinality constraints on inclusion and membership.
links something or someone to something or someone else