A Formalised Ontology of Election

Abstract

Election is a formal decision-making process by which a group of people choose an individual to hold a public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates. Though election processes are open and assumed to be known to all categories of people involved in an election, this has not always been the case. Hence, this paper presents a formalised ontology of election processes that enhances a quick understanding of election processes. Based on the acquired knowledge of the domain, concepts and relations were identified and organized into classes, subclasses and instances. The classes were organized in taxonomical order. Object properties which defined the relationships among the domain classes were also created. Description logic (DL) was used for the formalisation of the axioms while Protégé 5.0. was used to implement it. Competency questions were used to evaluate the information in the knowledge base. The ontology was queried using the DL query tab of Protégé and it provided correct answers to the competency questions.

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