Abstraction Levels

Abstraction Levels#

In JOLux, all the different legislative resources are usually described through three different levels of abstraction. These levels are necessary to be able to reference legislative resources either depending on language and file format or not.

Work, Expression and Manifestation#

jolux:Work

The owl:Class jolux:Work is a general abstraction for all the different legislative resources in JOLux. All the objects with type jolux:Work have additional types added to differentiate between the diverse legislative resources.

As jolux:Work is a general abstraction, the jolux:Work is language and file-format agnostic.

jolux:Expression

The owl:Class jolux:Expression is a language specific representation of a jolux:Work. The jolux:Expression is file-format agnostic.

jolux:Manifestation

The owl:Class jolux:Manifestation is a file-format specific representation of a jolux:Expression entity. So an jolux:Manifestation is a language and file-format specific representation of a jolux:Work.

So basically, jolux:Work, jolux:Expression and jolux:Manifestation always come together to form a rich representation of a legislative resource.

Object Properties#

The vocabulary used to connect these abstraction levels is as following:

jolux:isRealizedBy

The object property jolux:isRealizedBy points from a jolux:Work to a jolux:Expression.

jolux:isEmbodiedBy

The object property jolux:isEmbodiedBy points from a jolux:Expression to a jolux:Manifestation.

jolux:isExemplifiedBy

The object property jolux:isExemplifiedBy points from a jolux:Manifestation to an object that represent the URL of the actual document.

The following figure shows the different abstraction levels and the object properties to connect them:

_images/abstraction_levels.png

Relation between jolux:Work, jolux:Expression und jolux:Manifestation.#

SPARQL Examples#

The following question uses the above introduced abstraction levels to drill down from the URI of the Federal Constitution in the Official Compilation to the link of the PDF document in German:

PREFIX jolux: <http://data.legilux.public.lu/resource/ontology/jolux#>
SELECT * WHERE {
    <https://fedlex.data.admin.ch/eli/oc/1999/404> jolux:isRealizedBy ?expression.
    ?expression jolux:language <http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/DEU>;
        jolux:isEmbodiedBy ?manifestation.
    ?manifestation jolux:userFormat <https://fedlex.data.admin.ch/vocabulary/user-format/pdf-a>;
        jolux:isExemplifiedBy ?url.
}
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