Dealing with family relationships in linked data

Many web resources require an accurate representation of family relationships. However, available ontologies describing this kind of relationships provide only simple and rudimentary representations. In addition, the transition from one culture/language to another cannot be solved with simple translation solutions, specifically when concepts do not intersect in different cultures. In this paper, we propose a new ontology, called PersonLink, that defines rigorously and precisely different family relationships, and takes into account the differences that may exist between cultures and new relationships emerging in our societies nowadays. It provides a solution based on multicultural meta-ontology of concepts and associated mechanisms. Moreover, rules are provided to infer new links and/or check inconsistencies in the inputs. The PersonLink ontology has been applied, first, in the context of the CAPTAIN MEMO memory prosthesis (for modeling, storing, and reasoning on “family relationships” links), and then, in the context of the two large scale real-world datasets, Freebase and DBpedia.