Development
From Bibliographic Ontology Wiki
alolovarric I am proposing to orient the development of this ontology effort toward a user-task oriented development.
As explained in the "What is FRBR?" document:
"So what are these FRBR user tasks? Briefly, they are find, identify, select, and obtain. âFindâ involves meeting a userâs search criteria through an attribute or a relationship of an entity. This can be seen to combine both the traditional âfindâ and âcollocateâ objectives of a catalog. âIdentifyâ enables a user to confirm they have found what they looked for, distinguishing among similar resources. âSelectâ involves meeting a userâs requirements with respect to content, physical format, etc. or to reject an entity that doesnât meet the userâs needs. âObtainâ enables a user to acquire an entity through purchase, loan, etc., or electronic remote access."
So the goal here is to develop the ontology such as all these tasks performed by users can be performed by the usage of the ontology.
[edit] Step 1: defining users of the system
The first step is to find who are the users of such an ontology.
List of users and their descriptions (characteristics)
- Human
- Students or professors in a social science or law department
- Authors
- Editors/Publisher companies
- Information systems aggregating and exchanging bibliographic information
- Zitgist - Semantic web search engine
- Ping the Semantic Web - Semantic web pinging service
- Catalogue systems
- Citations and bibliographic management systems
- Zotero
- OpenDocument/OpenOffice
[edit] Step 2: determine the domain and scope of the ontology by competency questions
"One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions (Gruninger and Fox 1995). These questions will serve as the litmus test later: Does the ontology contain enough information to answer these types of questions? Do the answers require a particular level of detail or representation of a particular area? These competency questions are just a sketch and do not need to be exhaustive" (from the "Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology" article by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness).
[edit] That is included
- How many volumes in the Donald E. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming"?
- How many times the Donald E. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms" was republished in English?
- Does the Donald E. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms" have translations in foreign languages? How many?
- ...
[edit] That is excluded
- How many chapters are in the Donald E. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms"?
- ...
[edit] Step 3: defining classes and properties helping users to perform their tasks
Once we defined who are the users of that ontology, we have to check how each of these users will perform these tasks (finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining). This research will lead us to define the classes and properties of our bibliographic ontology.
Beyond the general goals of finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining items, this ontology also has another related requirement that is essential for citation-oriented uses: the ability to reliably machine-generate citations and bibliographic entries according to the detailed demands of publisher-mandated citation styles. Such style guides (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.) often include extensive rules that are based on characteristics of the item: both its type, as well as properties. As such, one must be able ot match the characteristics of a resource description to the formatting rules (as specified, for example, in the named templates in the CSL language). While in the long-run these details will diminish in importance as more content becomes web-accessible, in the short and midterm this is an esssential requirement. In any case, the characteristics that better allow a user to find resources also facilitates this goal.
In sum, then, the important components of this ontology are:
- classes to type:
- bibliographic items (book, article, interview)
- related items (periodicals, archival collections, etc.)
- agents (people, groups, organizations)
- events (conferences, hearings, etc.)
- user-related information such as notes, annotations, and tags.
- literal properties to describe resources (title, publication date, etc.).
- object properties (and subproperties) to describe relations between resources (contributor, part-whole, etc.)
In addition, comunity-oriented services such as the forthcoming zotero server, CiteULike, or Connote need to be able to encode information about:
- users and groups
- user-or-group-defined collections and libraries
[edit] Step 4: finding which classes and properties are already defined in other ontologies
Once the classes and properties of our ontology are defined, we will have to check if current ontologies already define these classes and properties. If yes, they will be used by the ontology (in the form of a Best Practices Guide), otherwise new classes or properties will have to be created to support these user tasks.
