Updating the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard RDF vocabulary to help linked data users

Open Ownership and Open Data Services have updated the Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabulary for the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) to support people who want to use beneficial ownership data in a linked format.

This builds on BODS – the world’s leading open standard – and makes it easier to query and use complex beneficial ownership data. It also demonstrates how producing beneficial ownership information in line with BODS can drive data use by making it easier to convert into a range of formats.

At vocab.openownership.org, you can find documentation describing how the BODS version 0.4 data model can be interpreted and used as RDF, so that beneficial ownership data can be published as, or converted to, linked data.

This includes information about when and why the RDF data model deviates from the JSON representation of BODS.

For the first time – thanks to changes made in version 0.4 of BODS – we are able to use RDF quads (subject, predicate, object, context) to provide more detail about the information’s context and provenance.

At vocab.openownership.org/terms, you can find the BODS RDF vocabulary in RDF Turtle and the HTML documentation of the RDF.

In the GitHub repository for this work, there is a Python script for converting the JSON schema to RDF. This is partially automated directly from the JSON, and contains some artisanal adjustments due to differences between the JSON data model and the RDF data model (which are explained in this documentation). The script also generates an HTML file of vocabulary documentation directly from the RDF using pyLODE.

Users of the vocabulary won’t need to run the script, as the vocabulary file is also included in the repository and available via the HTML documentation page.

This work is part of Open Ownership’s strategy to ensure more and higher-quality data on the ownership and control of legal vehicles is available to stakeholders in governments, companies, and civil society.

Open Ownership and Open Data Services welcome feedback on this work. Please email [email protected] or raise issues on the GitHub repository and our team will respond.