LACK Ontology

Prefix: lack:
Namespace: https://purl.net/climatesense/lack/ns#
Status: Draft

@prefix lack: <https://purl.net/climatesense/lack/ns#> .

Download the formal files: Turtle (.ttl) · Manchester Syntax (.omn)

Overview

LACK is a lightweight ontology for describing relationships between people and organisations, derived from a large corpus of real-world relation expressions relevant to lobbying against climate change awareness and policies. It provides a minimal, reusable vocabulary covering membership, employment, leadership, funding, founding, and association.

The ontology is built around two top-level types and a set of object properties connecting them.

Types

lack:Person

An individual human being.

lack:Collective

Any group of people organised around a shared purpose. This includes but is not limited to: companies, NGOs, think tanks, news agencies, political assemblies, events, committees, and networks.

Relations

Membership

Employment

Leadership

lack:leadsAt covers any named leadership or responsibility role within an organisation or department, including but not limited to: CEO, president, chair, director, VP, treasurer, secretary, COO, and department-level director roles. It is a sub-property of lack:employedBy, which is itself a sub-property of lack:associatedWith.

Funding

Covers funding, donation, commissioning, and award receipt.

Founding & Creation

Covers founding, co-founding, creation, incorporation, and launch.

Contribution

Covers contribution, authorship, distribution, presentation, and reposting.

Partnership

Sponsorship

Covers sponsorship, promotion, patronage, and support.

Association

General-purpose association or affiliation. Used when no more specific relation applies. This is the top-level relation from which most other relations in this ontology are derived.

Ownership & Acquisition

Covers acquisition, ownership, controlling interest, and shareholding.

Derivation

Event Organisation

Identity & Naming

We reuse owl:sameAs to cover identity, renaming, aliases, and doing-business-as relations.

Temporal Activity (entity-level)

These datatype properties attach temporal bounds directly to a lack:Person or lack:Collective.

Reification of Temporal Relations

When a relation is annotated with temporal information (since, until, or when), it is represented using RDF reification (rdf:Statement). The base triple is always asserted directly in addition to the reified statement.

When the source annotation is when (a point in time rather than an interval), both lack:since and lack:until are set to the same year value.

Example

@prefix lack: <https://purl.net/climatesense/lack/ns#> .
@prefix rdf:  <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix xsd:  <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

# Base triple always asserted
lack-entity:alice lack:employedBy lack-entity:org .

# Reified statement with interval
[] a rdf:Statement ;
    rdf:subject   lack-entity:alice ;
    rdf:predicate lack:employedBy ;
    rdf:object    lack-entity:org ;
    lack:since    "2010"^^xsd:gYear ;
    lack:until    "2020"^^xsd:gYear .

# Reified statement with point-in-time (when → since = until)
[] a rdf:Statement ;
    rdf:subject   lack-entity:alice ;
    rdf:predicate lack:memberOf ;
    rdf:object    lack-entity:boardX ;
    lack:since    "2015"^^xsd:gYear ;
    lack:until    "2015"^^xsd:gYear .

Full Vocabulary Summary

Schema.org Alignment

A mapping exercise to schema.org has been conducted. Key findings:

• Heavy reliance on schema:memberOf + roleName — schema.org has no dedicated properties for most named organisational roles (CEO, chair, treasurer, VP, etc.). The recommended pattern is to use schema:memberOf with a schema:Role wrapper and a roleName literal to capture the specific title.
• Inverse direction mismatches — many relations (funded, published, created, employed) are naturally expressed person→org in LACK, but schema.org models the predicate on the receiving entity (e.g. schema:funder is a property of the funded thing).
• No-match cases — highly specific operational or contractual relations (lobbied for, conducted public relations for, created a crisis plan for, launched, incorporated) have no schema.org equivalent and are better represented with custom predicates in a domain-specific vocabulary such as LACK.

Competency Questions

The following competency questions were used to drive the design of the ontology and the knowledge extraction process, and were refined based on data quality assessment after extraction. They represent the key questions that LACK is designed to answer.

Transparency and Disclosure

• CQ1: Which persons and organisations are involved in lobbying against climate science or policy?
• CQ2: Which organisations fund a given person or organisation, and what is the evidence for each funding relationship?
• CQ3: Which persons are members of a given organisation, and during which period?
• CQ4: Who are the leaders of a given organisation, and when did they hold that role?
• CQ5: Which organisations has a given person been employed by, and in what time periods?

Network Structure

• CQ6: Which organisations are partners of a given organisation?
• CQ7: Which organisations were founded by a given person or organisation?
• CQ8: Which organisations is a given organisation derived from, or has acquired?
• CQ9: Which persons or organisations are associated with a given entity (direct and indirect connections)?

Temporal Reasoning

• CQ10: Which relationships involving a given entity were active during a specific time interval?
• CQ11: Which organisations were active during a given period?

Identity and Deduplication

• CQ12: Which entities in the graph refer to the same real-world person or organisation?

Vocabulary Metadata

The following metadata is provided in accordance with the LOV Vocabulary Design Recommendations.