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About SSSOM, A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings

SSSOM is a simple metadata standard for describing semantic mappings:

  1. Introducing a machine-readable and extensible vocabulary to describe metadata of mappings.
  2. Defining an easy to use table-based format that can be integrated into existing data science pipelines without the need to parse or query ontologies, and that integrates seamlessly with Linked Data standards.
  3. Implementing open and community-driven collaborative workflows designed to evolve the standard continuously to address changing requirements and mapping practices.
  4. Providing reference tools and software libraries for working with the standard.

A SSSOM mapping comprises three major components:

  1. The mapping itself, that is, a triple <subject, predicate, object> that reflects a correspondence of a subject entity, for example a class in an ontology, to an object entity, for example an identifier in some database, via a semantic mapping predicate, such as skos:exactMatch.
  2. A mapping justification, which the process or activity that led us to consider the mapping to be correct or reasonable (typical examples: labels match exactly; two classes are logically equivalent; a domain expert determined that two terms reflect the same real world concept).
  3. Provenance metadata, including information about author and mapping_tool.

For a detailed overview see here.