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Semantic Web Application - Using BBC Sports ontology

I am trying to create a semantic web application about running a race in my area (10k, half marathons, marathons). Specifically, I want to collect and publish (in RDF) data about races, participants, and results, and combine similar data. For the last few weeks I've been testing Jena (including TDB) doing some web scraping from static websites about starting races and reading about dictionaries and ontologies.

I think the most authoritative ontology used for my application, as well as the one with the lowest barrier to entry (not very overhauled), is the BBC sports ontology. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/sport/2011-02-17.shtml

I have a few questions about the use of sports at the BBC and building the app:

Is it okay for me to use the BBC sports ontology even if I'm just using a small subset?

I wanted to look at the schema for the ontology to understand it better, but I can't find it anywhere. Is the BBC keeping this a secret or am I just looking in the wrong places?

Can I know for sure if I am using the ontology correctly? My native language is not English, so I am afraid that I might misunderstand some concepts in the ontology.

When I add new triplets to the triple store (TDB), what is the convention for creating a new URI for the resource? More specifically, should the URI end with a name or a uid? Will this affect the merging of similar data from different datasets?

Can you recommend any semantic web tools for generating resource URIs? I am not putting the app on the internet anytime soon, but it would be nice if I could access the URI locally like

http://localhost/running/12345.
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You have several different questions here, and some are easier to answer than others.

Search for BBC Ontologies

Many of the BBC websites use content negotiation for documents, and you can get the RDF documents you are looking for by setting the appropriate HTTP headers, or more simply by requesting a resource with the appropriate extension. For example, a human-readable version of the ontology

To get a machine readable version use

The fact that they are doing this is not immediately obvious. At least one of the places mentioned is their "Channels and Data" section of Nature , which says:

How do I get RDF?

You have several options. We discuss content by our standard urls - if you are the client request header, specify RDF, then what you get. Alternatively, you add .rdf to the end of our urls, then we will return RDF, not HTML.

You can use as few or many of the classes, properties and individuals defined in BBC ontologies as you wish. This is part of the beauty of the Semantic Web. As far as correct use is concerned, most of them have several descriptive labels, but these labels are in English. I don't think there is an automated way to check your usage; I'm afraid you will probably just need to have someone more comfortable to communicate with in English. Of course, you can also add labels and comments in your own language and make it available to others. This is another nice thing about the Semantic Web and related data, you can say anything about anything whenever you want.



Identifier creation conventions

There is no single standard for creating an IRI. It's nice if they are human readable, but if you produce a lot of software, it's hard to do. If you can't make them human readable, at least be sure to point them rdfs:label

out when you can. The question about IRI agreements can be more on http://answers.semanticweb.com and you will probably get better answers if you ask there.

Make your IRI locally distinguishable

As stated, you are asking for a tool and this question is not valid for StackOverflow:

Questions that invite us to recommend or find a tool, library, or favorite resource off-site, off-topic, as they tend to attract stubborn answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to fix it.

Again, you better get your luck at http://answers.semanticweb.com . The short answer, however, is that you will be looking for a lightweight web server. You can even get through by asking the web server to request an IRI to describe a SPARQL request requesting IRI information. Thus, when you ask:

http://localhost/running/12345

You will return the results

describe <http://localhost/running/12345>
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