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Context Data Model

Revision as of 03:37, 3 March 2008 by Unnamed Poltroon (Talk) (Introduction)

Introduction

Although it can be used for almost any kind of data, the focus of the Higgins Global Graph is to provide a foundation for integrating, unifying, and sharing identity-related data. In particular we are focused on information about a person, a group or an entire organization. This might include contact information, authentication data, preferences, email addresses, interests, employer-related information. An object representing a single person, might have relationships to other objects and other people in the same or different data contexts.

Note that Higgins provides only an abstract, base vocabulary for identity information. Definitions of specific attributes and sets of attributes, as well as classes of objects (e.g. calendar events, movies, books, etc.) are all left to be defined by Higgins Context Provider developers.

See the Higgins Data Model Intro (PPT) for a Powerpoint overview.

See Higgins Global Graph Background for information about motivations and design goals.

Domain Concepts

The Higgins Global Graph defines these Concepts (listed alphabetically):

  1. Attribute
  2. Context
  3. ContextId
  4. Context Relation
  5. Context Correlation
  6. Data Range --formerly Attribute Value Datatype
  7. Entity
  8. Node --formerly Digital Subject
  9. NodeId
  10. Node Relation
  11. Node Correlation

Higgins Ontology Language (HOWL)

Rather than invent a new metamodel from scratch, the Higgins Global Graph is based on the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL 1.0). We use RDF and OWL to express an abstract base ontology called HOWL (higgins.owl) that in turn describes the domain of identity information.

Extending HOWL

HOWL is a base ontology. To be useful in real-world applications developers must develop specialized ontologies based on HOWL that describe a specific concrete domain.

For example, if a developer wanted to describe a CRM database, she would create an OWL ontology that would describe the data objects in the CRM database. This CRM database is called a Context in Higgins. If, for example, the database contained records about customers and those customers had full-names and email addresses, then the developer would define "Customer" as a sub-class of Node and "full-name" and "email" as kinds of Attributes.

Here are some HOWL-based Ontologies (note - these need to be updated):


Open Issues

References

RDF/OWL Related Resources

Misc Resources

Links

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