The Transparent Relations Ontology (TRO): a vocabulary to describe conflicts of interest

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Transparent Relations Ontology (TRO), a simple, interoperable vocabulary designed to publish data about potentially conflicting relationships among powerful entities to promote transparency and detect conflicts of interest.

Contribution

It presents a minimal, reusable ontology for publishing data on relations between powerful parties, with a rigorous development process and real-world application example.

Findings

Successfully integrated data from government and news sources.

Demonstrated the ontology's utility in identifying conflicts of interest.

Established a foundation for future enhancements to improve transparency.

Abstract

The Transparent Relations Ontology (TRO) offers a vocabulary to publish data about relations between powerful parties that should be more transparent, in order to detect possible conflicts of interest. TRO is based on minimal modelling, reusing common vocabularies to offer a simple yet useful resource to publish interoperable data about pointers to relations that might result in corruption cases. Additionally, best practices have been followed in order to sustain a technically rigorous ontology development process. A usage example with real data is mentioned, integrating information from Basque Government's Open Data services and a news outlet. Building upon its foundational design, future enhancements of TRO could significantly amplify its utility in uncovering and scrutinizing opaque relationships that may lead to corruption.