Development Brainstorming

From Bibliographic Ontology Wiki

This page is just to put some thoughts we have while thinking about the development of the ontology.

1 Why Yet Another Bibliographic Ontology?
2 Goals of the Bibliographic Ontology
3 Possible ontologies to Reuse
4 Other bibliographic and citations ontologies
5 Ontology users
6 Social Web Systems Representation
7 Other Resources

[edit] Why Yet Another Bibliographic Ontology?

A fair point, but the reason why we need this is because the existing stuff is not adequate. The first corresponds to a narrow range of academic users (last I looked it wouldn't work for the humanities or law), and the second is just a series of properties, mostly already covered by DC and maintained by a fairly closed industry group not very interested in RDF. The only properties they have that are useful and unique IIRC are volume and number, and the latter is actually wrong (it should be "issue" or "issueNumber") anyway.

Also, nobody has yet seemed to even try to solve how to incorporate RDF into authoring workflows. I have RDF data, in other words, then what? How do I used it to format my citations?

In the absence of that supoprt, existing RDF data is not very helpful for users. This is why the class model is important.

Finally, Ive not been happy with how anybody has solved contributor modeling for bibliographic data in RDF.

I'd prefer reusing as much as possible from other ontologies (DC, vCard, SKOS, etc.), but certainly at minimum we need a comprehensive class model.

I don't think fragmentation is the problem in here. The problem is the lack of compelling solutions (applications, services and so forth), and stuff like Zotero will change that Bottomline: we need something that can support Zotero and OpenOffice bibliographic user needs. The existing options do not.

From comments on a blog post:

The problem for me, though, is that both MARC and bibtex (and even DC depending on how you use it) are flat data models. They might be fine for library data (which is sourced from MARC of course) or for some scientific users, but they are really not very semweb-ish ways to model data.

Practically speaking, they don't work well for my data needs for example, which are the same data needs as lots of scholarly users in the humanities, social sciences, and law.

I guess we should keep in mind different requirements and users: the ontology I was working on was not designed for libraries. It was designed for scholars from a wide range of fields who are the primary users for both Zotero and the OpenOffice bibliographic project.

[edit] Goals of the Bibliographic Ontology

Should be a superset of legacy formats like BibTeX, RIS, and so forth
Must support the most demanding needs in the social sciences, humanities, and law, and those who deal with non-Western languages
The class system must be able to map to the type system in the citation style language I [Bruce] designed. In short, it is not enough to just encode the data: it needs to be able to be formatted according to the often archaic details of citation styles
Should be developer-friendly; I consider examples like DOAP and SKOS to be models here
Behind all of these goals are a more concrete goal: it should be perfect for using in OpenDocument/OpenOffice citation support and should handle Zotero's needs.

[edit] Possible ontologies to Reuse

FRBR: as the basement of the ontology
FOAF: as the way to describe authors
SIOC: as a way to describe everything related to the social software World: wiki pages, blog posts, mailing list threads, etc.
MO: as a way to describe everything related to musical things
DC: do I have to say why?
Event: as a way to describe some events like workshops, conferences, etc.
Timeline: as a way to describe complex temporal frameworks

[edit] Other bibliographic and citations ontologies

[edit] Ontology users

OpenDocument/OpenOffice citation system
Zotero
Zitgist
Students or professors in a social science or law department
Book selling systems such as Amazon.com, Alibris.com or Abebooks.com
Book, journals, etc. publishers
Citations and references site like: CiteULike, Connotea, Memento
Authors

[edit] Social Web Systems Representation

Bruce in Reference Types wrote:

When designing a citation format (or, um, microformat) one of the more difficult issues is deciding on types. Book and article are really simple and straightforward. But what happens if you need to handle weblog posts, archival documents, dissertations, and so forth?

For everything related to weblogs, mailing list threads, blogs, etc. we should consider to use the SIOC Ontology for that exact purpose. How we will include it into that ontology has to be defined.