OPS: Social Participation Ontology Social Participation Ontology: community documentation, enhancements and use examples Renato Fabbri, 1, a) Henrique Parra Parra Filho, b) Rodrigo Bandeira de Luna, c) Ricardo Augusto Poppi Martins, d) Flor Karina Mamani Amanqui, e) and Dilvan de Abreu Moreira f) Instituto de F´ ısica de S˜ ao Carlos, Universidade de S˜ao Paulo (IFSC/USP) (Dated: 26 January 2015) Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments. South America presents a prominent context with mixed culture and social predisposition. In 2012, civil, academic and governmental parties started elaborating the “Common Vocabulary of Social Participation” (vcps from the Brazilian name Vocabul´ario Comum de Participa¸ c˜ ao Social ), as a public and online process. By May, 2013, first reference documents were publicized, together with a preliminary owl code, logos, and a diagram of a general “public consultation”. The corais platform kept online records of the process, like discussions and preparation of texts. This article exposes this material and proposes an elementary unfolding: the “Social Participation Ontology” (ops from the Brazilian name Ontologia de Participa¸ c˜aoSocial ). To exhibit this new ontology, these steps were considered: correction of ontological contradictions and owl protocol use errors; completion of vcps owl code into a preliminary version of the ops; translations and standardizations; enhancements of class names and labels in Portuguese, Spanish and English; a toy expansion of the ontology by further specifying classes; linked data examples regarding dereferencing, a sparql endpoint and participatory instances; use cases by researchers and public managers. Ongoing work involves further adoption of ops by the official Brazilian federal portal of social participation, further adoption by civil participatory organizations, and linkage to other participatory ontologies. ops is being used as an upper ontology, and all classes linked further to foaf and bfo as higher upper ontologies. PACS numbers: 89.65-s,07.05.Bx,07.05.Kf Keywords: OWL, semantic web, linked data, electronic democracy, participatory democracy, social systems I. INTRODUCTION Easy access to social media is reshaping citizen par- ticipation in government affairs 1 . Information and com- munication technologies (icts) have exhibited such an impact on the way individuals interact that it is giv- ing birth to new organizational methods in social move- ments. These changes can be observed, for example, in the 2010 Arab Spring and the 2013 Brazilian protests. These events gathered millions of people and, although recent, have shown direct and strong impact in govern- ments and new laws, and the forecast is an intensification of the process 2–4 . Concomitantly, electronic government initiatives are flourishing, favored mainly by the ubiquity of Internet a) http://ifsc.usp.br/˜fabbri/; Electronic mail: fabbri@usp.br b) http://www.cidadedemocratica.org.br/; Electronic mail: hen- rique@cidadedemocratica.org.br; Cidade Democr´atica c) http://www.cidadedemocratica.org.br/; Electronic mail: ro- drigoyellow@cidadedemocratica.org.br; Cidade Democr´ atica d) http://ricardopoppi.org/; Electronic mail: ri- cardo.poppi@presidencia.gov.br; Social Participation Department, Social Articulation National Secretariat, Brazilian Presidency General Secretariat of the Republic (DPS/SNAS/SG-PR) e) http://java.icmc.usp.br; Electronic mail: florka- rina27@gmail.com; Instituto de Ciˆ encias Matem´aticas e de Computa¸c˜ ao (ICMC/USP) f) http://java.icmc.usp.br; Electronic mail: dilvan@icmc.usp.br; also at (ICMC/USP) technologies (e.g. html 5, node.js, open source browsers) and by the need for renewal of representative democ- racy practices. These initiatives have taken place in various platforms, including usual social networks (e.g. facebook, twitter) and dedicated clients created by both government and civil society agents 1,5–7 . A natural challenge arises: how to link information produced into an unified knowledge base. This is being addressed, at the technology level, by semantic web de- velopments. Endorsed by World Wide Web Consortium (w3c), current semantic web technologies include 8 : • reasoning by means of ontological specifications, • linking data from different sources (e.g. databases), • organization of domain knowledge for coherent con- sideration. Key among these technologies, ontologies are consid- ered one of the pillars of the semantic web. An ontology is usually defined as a formal specification of a shared conceptualization 9 . They give meaning to data and are useful for datasets available on the web to make them au- tomatically retrievable and linkable with other datasets. The w3c created the Web Ontology Language (owl) as a standard to represent ontologies in the web. The second version of the language is called owl 2 and offers greater expressive power 10 , but the version is omitted with very few exceptions. In this context, to describe and give meaning to social participation, the “Common Vocabulary of Social Par- arXiv:1501.02662v2 [cs.CY] 13 Jan 2015