Agreements Ontology

This Agreements ontology is designed to model 'agreements' which are social contracts that include: licenses, laws, contracts, Memoranda of Understanding, standards and definitional metadata. Its purpose is to support data sharing by making explicit the relationships between agreements and data and agreements and Agents (people and organisations). Eventually it will also help with the interplay between different classes of agreements. We think of this ontology as a 'middle' ontology, that is one which specializes well-known, abstract, upper ontologies and is able to be used fairly widely but is expected to be used particular contexts in conjunction with detailed, domain-specific, lower ontologies. We have tried to rely on: existing agent, data manipulation, metadata and licence ontologies where possible. As such we specialise the ORG and FOAF ontologies; the PROV ontology; the Dublin Core Terms RDF schema & DCAT ontology; and the ODRS vocabulary & Creative Commons RDF data models for those areas, respectively