VSON — Visual Scene Ontology Notation

Version 1.2 · Apache-2.0 · github.com/yamancan/visual-scene-ontology

VSON represents what is in a picture as a typed, validatable RDF graph: the entities depicted, the qualities they bear, the spatial and temporal facts that hold between them, and the frame the scene is seen through. The OWL ontology below declares the terms, and the SHACL shapes decide whether a given document is well-formed — well-formedness is a validation result here, not a convention.

This host serves the namespace documents themselves. The project — the transpilers, the CLI, the test corpus and the specification — lives in the GitHub repository linked above.

Ontology

/v1/ontology.ttl — the VSO TBox: entity taxonomy, frame layer, reification node classes and the closed value vocabularies the shapes validate against.
Namespace https://w3id.org/vson/v1/ontology#, prefix vso:.

RCC-8 value vocabulary

/v1/rcc8.ttl — the eight RCC-8 base relation names, as a closed vocabulary of values for vso:rcc.
Namespace https://w3id.org/vson/v1/rcc8#, prefix rcc:.

Allen interval relations

/v1/allen.ttl — Allen's thirteen base relations on intervals, declared as object properties between perdurants, with their inverses.
Namespace https://w3id.org/vson/v1/allen#, prefix allen:.

SHACL shapes — strict profile

/v1/shapes.ttl — the shapes a conformant VSON document must satisfy.
Shape names are minted in https://w3id.org/vson/v1/shapes#, prefix vss:.

SHACL shapes — relaxed profile

/v1/shapes-relaxed.ttl — the partial validation profile, for documents still being extracted or repaired. It shares the vss: namespace with the strict profile; the two are separate documents, not separate vocabularies.

JSON-LD context

/v1/context.jsonld — binds the Composition-level reference properties to their VSO IRIs so a JSON-LD processor materializes the same graph the Turtle surface carries. It maps names; it does not constrain them. The shapes above are what enforce well-formedness.

JSON Schemas

/v1/schema/vson-output.schema.json — the extractor response envelope.
/v1/schema/vson-jsonld.schema.json — the structural skeleton of the JSON-LD scene form.

Both are structural only. A payload can satisfy either schema and still fail SHACL.

Canonical names. The canonical IRIs are https://w3id.org/vson/v1/… — permanent identifiers under the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group. The redirect from those names to the documents on this host is still under review; until it merges, resolve the paths on this host directly. The names above are what a document should cite either way: they are the identifiers, this host is only where the bytes currently sit.