Proposal for a new organisation of the SSN Ontology

Hi,

It's pretty quiet on this list so far, so here is a try at generating  
some discussion.

I've been thinking about the SSN Ontology and wondering if it wouldn't  
be better organised into a set of ontologies, rather than just one.  A  
couple of reasons:

- the SSO (stimulus sensor observation) pattern isn't usable on its own

- the SSN ontology introduces things like deployments, which aren't  
sensor only, and

- I keep getting asked about the dolce alignment and how it's all very  
nice and all, but it seems like lots of users would rather maybe know  
it's there, but not have to use it


So attached I have a first cut at doing this.

- It starts with the SSO as an independent ontology.

- Then importing this is the SSNO, which should amount to all the  
'sensor only' concepts.

- From there is SSNO plus the alignment as a separate branch and  
another branch which adds Systems and Devices and then Platforms and  
Deployments.

- Finally, is the whole thing aligned to DUL.  This should be pretty  
much equivalent to the original ontology.


I hope that's able to be navigated with the attached files.   My  
expectation is that the sensor ontology could be just the first two  
(SSO & SSNO) and then from there as a community we could define a  
number of useful stubs and examples - so take the systems and  
deployments branch as a stub of how to incorporate systems, devices  
and deployments.  For example, units, time, location, etc might also  
be useful stubs.  These together with a set of examples and libraries  
(say of definitions of real devices and domains) could really help to  
get people started with the ontology and help us share common fragments.

All this should give us a somewhat more minimal ontology and a better  
organisation of extensions etc.

Thoughts, ideas, comments, disagreements, etc..?

Michael