13. MAKING AND USING AN ONTOLOGY (CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM)

Ontologies have been described in Sec. 8. See for the latest formal version for COMPASS at:

http://pagenome-compass.pbworks.com/PA+Genome+Ontology

As mentioned, you can make up your own ontology, but are strongly urged to use the existing one for the sake of consistency and user simplicity. Regardless, as a starter, COMPASS’s system can be copied from the above web site and pasted into the source case web site.

As an example of how to use the COMPASS ontology in the creation of a page for a variable, let us take the one above:

            (TV-ANPR) “CCTV-Automatic Number Plate Recognition”

What we try to do is match up each “major” word in the variable with an item in the ontology. So, our selected variable has four major words (or terms, like “CCTV”), and we will be looking for four corresponding items in the ontology. Some candidates are:

CCTV                         Automatic                  Number Plate                       Recognition 

Communication       Information                Language                              Being/Existence

            System           Technology          Accountability                         Public/Private

Two of the four have almost exact fits, but the essence of, say, “CCTV” is difficult to capture in one word (although there is no requirement to use just one). For simplicity, though, we will select only “Communication System” to be representative.

The selected categories then are listed at the bottom of the information for the respective variable. See TP Page16 for an illustration.

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