Introduction

Aggregate Concepts are used in some FinnONTO ontologies to represent the situation when a concept has been determined to be ambiguous and has been split into several concepts representing the different meanings. The aggregate concept is a marker for the old, unsplit, ambiguous concept and contains an explicit representation of its relationship to the new component concepts.

Transforming aggregate concepts to SKOS

There is no "official" SKOS representation for aggregate concepts. When Skosify encounters an aggregate concept, it will create a special concept scheme for these and place the aggregate concepts within this aggregate concept scheme. Otherwise they are represented as regular skos:Concepts. The mapping between the unsplit aggregate concepts and the constituent parts is represented using the skos:broadMatch property.

images/aggregate-example.png

Figure: Example of transforming aggregate concepts into a SKOS representation. Note that the owl:unionOf representation actually uses a rdf:List, as specified by OWL.