Social Participation Ontology: community documentation, enhancements and use examples

Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments. South America presents a prominent context with mixed culture and social predisposition. In 2012, civil, academic and governmental parties started elaborating the “Common Vocabulary of Social Participation” (vcps from the Brazilian name Vocabulário Comum de Participação Social), as a public and online process. By May, 2013, first reference documents were publicized, 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. This article exposes this material and proposes an elementary unfolding: the “Social Participation Ontology” (ops from the Brazilian name Ontologia de Participação Social). To exhibit this new ontology, these steps were considered: correction of ontological contradictions and owl protocol use errors; completion of vcps owl code into a preliminary version of the ops; translations and standardizations; enhancements of class names and 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 by researchers and public managers. Ongoing work involves further adoption of ops by the official Brazilian federal portal of social participation, further adoption by civil participatory organizations, and linkage to other participatory ontologies. ops is being used as an upper ontology, and all classes linked further to foaf and bfo as higher upper ontologies.