Muriel Foulonneau et al.
The Document ontology represents Equivalences with a target and a source as DocumentType. An Equivalence occurs when a particular document type( source) is equivalent to another document type( target)( Foulonneau et al., 2012). However theoretically simple( e. g., owl: EquivalentClass), the representation of equivalences had to take into consideration a number of constraints. The Equivalence is not represented as a symmetric property for two reasons. On the one hand, the property is conditional. It is possible to restrict the validity of an equivalence to a particular Procedure( its context) and define DocumentOfficialAttributes required for their validity, such as the official translation of the document. On the other hand, the relation of equivalence is not completely symmetric. Even if a document X from Portugal is accepted in all cases as a substitute for document Y from Luxembourg by the Luxembourgish authorities, the Portuguese authorities do not have to accept document Y from Luxembourg as a substitute for document X from Portugal.
An Information class aims to support the definition of the data that is contained in a document, such as the name or the birthdate of a person.
The Document Type taxonomy provides the hierarchical structure of document types. It is also represented as an ontology. It uses the subtypeOf property to represent hierarchical relations. For instance, a French passport is a subtypeOf passport. This mechanism is equivalent to the broaderTransitive property in SKOS( W3C standard for Simple Knowledge Organization System) 7, which provides a structure for taxonomies and thesaurus in the Semantic Web environment.
3.2 Application ontology
The Documents are included when a user submits an Application( Cf. Figure 1). The Application is represented with concepts such as the submitter of the application or the applicant. An Application is expected to follow a particular Procedure that determines the path and expected Documents, Information( e. g., the birthdate) typically provided through a form, and ConditionRules( e. g., the applicant should be above 18). The Validity of the Application is inferred from the Validity of the individual required Documents and other conditions( such as the provision of certain Information), as determined from the Procedure.
Figure 1: Application ontology
OWL versions of these ontologies have been created. They are used in the semantic pilots developed in SPOCS for the validation of documents transferred through the SPOCS infrastructure. In order to implement a 7
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