DFG Fachsystematik Ontology / DFG Classification of Subject Areas Ontology

DFG (The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - German Research Foundation) Classification of Scientific Disciplines, Research Areas, Review Boards and Subject Areas is published as a PDF or HTML (see links below).

We decided to build upon this work and build and RDF based ontology, for the DFG Classification of Subject Areas, so that browsing, searching and mapping (of subject number and its label) could be easy achieved by ontology/RDF processing software, such as ontology-lookup systems and tripe-stores.

Ontology

• Ontology TTL: dfgfo.ttl
• Ontology PURL: https://w3id.org/dfgfo/2024
• ontology prefix/id: dfgfo

Create/update ontology

dfgfo.ttl ontology file is created, by scripts/create_ontology.py python script, which

• parses the DFG classification system encoded in csv/Fachsystematik_20XX-20XX.csv (in EN/DE) (cf. directory csv/ and csv/README.md)
• encodes each of the DFG's classification subjects (in .csv cells) into RDF graph triples
  • of type owl:Class
  • with rdfs:label in EN and skos:altLabel in DE
  • subsumed to parent subject with rdfs:subClassOf accordinng to DFG Classification hierarchy
• parses the metadata triples from metadata.ttl into a graph
• joins metadata and DFG classification graphs into dfgfo.ttl

Run

Create a python3 Virtual Environment

Install requirements pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt

Run script to create ontology python scripts/create_ontology.py. Make sure to use end of line sequence LF in the csv file used to create the ontology (for example when working on Windows).

Other scripts

• scripts/parse_csv.py parses the CSV and ensures that the columns Subject Number and Fachnummer have the same values

Ontology contributions

Contributions are welcome.

At every push or pull_request a ROBOT report and ROBOT validate OWL DL profile test will be run from .github/workflows/main.yml.

DFG Classification of Scientific Disciplines

• HTML page
• PDFs
  • 2020-2024
    • PDF (en) (link is broken)
    • PDF (de) (local copy)
  • 2024-2028
    • PDF (en) (local copy)
    • PDF (de) (local copy)
• Edited CSV - combining both German and English labels
  • 2020-2024 (this repo)
  • 2024-2028 (this repo)

Releases

For previous versions (2020-2024) see https://github.com/tibonto/DFG-Fachsystematik-Ontology/releases

Use Cases

Are you or your institution using the DFG-Fachsystematik-Ontology? We would like to hear from you (via an issue), and include your use-case in this section.

• DaRUS - the data repository of the University of Stuttgart: DFGFO is used to classify datasets according to topic, see example 10.18419/darus-3988