Role of ontology has been defined in distinction to controlled vocabulary
Discussion with Sabine brought up, that the controlled vocabulary for StationMeta/ResultType is only used internally, it has no relevance for TOAR users. That would imply it should not be part of the ontology. Purpose of the ontology is:
- provide definitions for terms used in the controlled vocabulary
- provide the source of the definitions
- maintain relations between terms
- support synonyms of terms from the controlled vocabulary
- provide the information to users (via a web page)
The controlled vocabulary is kept in the TOAR database to keep them with the data and not separate from them. The adantage of it is to easily set up the TOAR database at a different place from a single source.
Deleting StationMeta/ResultType from the Ontology has implications: Either the tool which compares the controlled vocabulary and the ontology to make sure that they are at the same level has to be able to take care of exceptions or StationMeta/ResultType should be removed from the controlled vocabulary.
As one of the purposes of the ontology is to provide users with definitons of the terms and concepts it is important that also the timezones are part of the ontology. As the country codes they are automatically generated and added to the ontology. The ontology tool fills the annotation fields rdfs:label and skos:defintion as well as the description field owl:equivalentClass and adds the necessary NamedIndividuals.