FRAPO, the Funding, Research Administration and Projects Ontology

FRAPO, the Funding, Research Administration and Projects Ontology, is a CERIF-compliant ontology available from http://purl.org/cerif/frapo/ for describing administrative information relating to grant funding and research projects.  It can be used for the characterization of grant applications, funding bodies, research projects, project partners, etc., in other words the sort of information stored in Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).   It can also be used to describe other types of projects, for example building projects and educational projects.

FRAPO, which is written in OWL2-DL, imports FOAF, the Friend of a Friend Vocabulary for characterizing people.  FRAPO is designed to be used in conjunction with SCoRO, the Scholarly Contributions and Roles Ontology, described in a previous blog post, that provides structured vocabulary terms to describe the contributions and roles of scholars, and the organizations of which they are members, with respect to projects, research investigations and other academic activities describable using FRAPO, and to the scholarly journal articles and other outputs that result from them.

Terms for documents of relevance to the scholarly domain covered by FRAPO, including grant applications, project plans, project reports, datasets and journal articles, are already provided by FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, and are therefore not included within FRAPO.

The basic concepts within the FRAPO model are shown in the following figure.

Legend: The basic concepts within the FRAPO model.

FRAPO also permits descriptions of various types of applications, funding programs, infrastructure entities (e.g. services and research facilities), and a wide range of financial entities (e.g. accounts, contracts, quotations, purchases, invoices and payments), and the relationships between them (e.g. has application outcome, is manufactured by, is purchased by, has dispatch date, has purchase order number, has acronym) not shown in the diagram above.

As soon as it is available, a Graffoo technical diagram of the FRAPO structure will be added to this post.

A discussion of the manner in which FRAPO and SCoRO relate to CERIF, the Common European Research Information Framework, will be the subject of a subsequent post.  Suffice it to say now that while CERIF has a relational database model, making automated conversion of CERIF metadata to ‘clean’ RDF difficult, FRAPO and SCoRO are OWL2-DL ontologies designed for expressing the same concepts cleanly as Linked Data.

Additionally, by working together and with the other SPAR ontologies, and by employing the Time-indexed Value in Context Pattern (TVC) discussed in the SCoRO blog post, they enable both the contexts and the time frames of roles and contributions to academic endeavours to be clearly articulated.

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