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 https://www.omg.org/spec/Commons/20220501/Collections.rdf version of this ontology was modified to better differentiate some of the properties that are subproperties of comprises to aid in user understanding, add new properties that allow for taxonomic parthood, and add a property allowing users to describe the intended method used with respect to arrangement (COMMONS-12).
The collections ontology conforms with the OWL 2 DL semantics, and is outside of OWL 2 RL due to the inclusion of a min 0 cardinality 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.
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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
Users should use either comprises or hasPart, or one of their respective subproperties, to include things in a collection.
component of a collection or combination of things
Users should use either isIncludedIn or isPartOf, or one of their respective subproperties, to include a constituent in a collection.
collection that has a clearly defined structure or organization
Examples include collections organized thematically, alphabetically, by method used to 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.
Users should use the hasMethod property on arrangement to describe the methodology for structuring the collection.
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. Whole-part relations are transitive, whereas comprises is not defined to be transitive, so this property is useful in cases where cardinality constraints are needed. comprises and hasPart are not explicitly declared as disjoint to avoid reasoning issues, but should be considered as such.
This property is disjoint with hasMember, and should be used in cases where the constituents of something are not considered discrete elements of whatever they are included in, such as a substance or composite.
indicates an immediate 'child' part of something
This property is useful in cases where one is interested in the direct relationships between parts of things, for example to build a tree view.
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.
provides a text description of an approach or method used to accomplish something
This property can be used to describe an arrangement or ordering applied to a collection.
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.
indicates an immediate 'parent' of this part
Something that is included in something else may be an independently identifiable, discrete element or may be an indistinguishable element once it is combined with the target.
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.