This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. This copyright applies to the Bibliographic Ontology Specification
and accompanying documentation and does not apply to Bibliographic Ontology data formats,
ontology terms, or technology. Regarding underlying technology, Bibliographic Ontology
relies heavily on W3C's RDF
technology, an open Web standard
that can be freely used by anyone.
This visual layout and structure of the
specification was adapted from the FOAF
Vocabulary Specification by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller and the SIOC Ontology Specification by Uldis Bojar and John G. Breslin.
Yves Raimond created a new and enhanced document generator called OntoSpec used to generate this document.
Abstract
The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web.
Status of This Document
NOTE:This section describes the status of this document at the time
of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.
This specification is an evolving document. This document is generated
by a machine-readable Bibliographic Ontology expressed in RDF/XML with a specification template.
Authors welcome suggestions on the Bibliographic Ontology and this document. This document may be updated or added to based on implementation experience, but no commitment is made
by the authors regarding future updates.
The Bibliographic Ontology describe bibliographic things on the semantic Web in RDF. This ontology can be used as a citation ontology, as a document classification ontology, or simply as a way to describe any kind of document in RDF. It has been inspired by many existing document description metadata formats, and can be used as a common ground for converting other bibliographic data sources.
Terminology and Notation
The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC 2119].
Namespace URIs of the general form "http://www.example.com/." represents some application-dependent
or context-dependent URI as defined in RFC 2396 [RFC 2396].
The XML Namespace URI that MUST be used by implementations of this specification is:
http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/
Bibliographic Ontology At A Glance
An alphabetical index of Bibliographic Ontology terms, by class (categories or types), by
property and by individuals. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.
External Ontologies used by the Bibliographic Ontology At A Glance
An alphabetical index of external ontologies terms, by class (categories or types), by
property and by individuals, used by the Bibliographic Ontology. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.
The Bibliographic Ontology definitions presented here are written using
a computer language (RDF/OWL) that makes it easy for software to
process some basic facts about the terms in the Bibliographic Ontology, and
consequently about the things described in Bibliographic Ontology documents. A Bibliographic Ontology
document, unlike a traditional Web page, can be combined with other
Bibliographic Ontology documents to create a unified database of information.
This specification serves as the Bibliographic Ontology "namespace document". As such
it describes the Bibliographic Ontology and the terms (RDF classes and properties) that
constitute it, so that Semantic
Web applications can use those terms in a variety of RDF-compatible
document formats and applications.
This document presents the Bibliographic Ontology as a Semantic Web vocabulary or Ontology.
The Bibliographic Ontology is straightforward, pragmatic and designed to allow
simultaneous deployment and extension, and is therefore intended for
widescale use.
Evolution and
Extension of the Bibliographic Ontology
The Bibliographic Ontology is identified by the namespace URI
'http://purl.org/ontology/biblio/'.
Revisions and extensions of Bibliographic Ontology are conducted through edits to the namespace document, which by convention is published in the Web at the namespace
URI.
The properties and types defined here provide some basic
concepts for use in Bibliographic Ontology descriptions. Other vocabularies (e.g. the
Dublin Core metadata elements for
simple bibliographic description, FOAF, etc.) can also be mixed in with the Bibliographic Ontology terms, as can local
extensions. The Bibliographic Ontology is designed to be extended, and modules may be added
at a later date.
Bibliographic Ontology Modules
Bibliographic Ontology modules may be used to extend the ontology and avoid making the base ontology too complex.
The Bibliographic Ontology and Standards
It is important to understand that the Bibliographic Ontology as specified in this document is not a standard
in the sense of ISO Standardisation,
or that associated with W3C Process.
The Bibliographic Ontology depends heavily on W3C's standards work, specifically on XML, XML Namespaces, RDF, and OWL.
All the Bibliographic Ontology documents must be well-formed RDF/XML documents.
This specification contributes an ontology, the "Bibliographic Ontology ", to the Semantic
Web, specifying it using W3C's Resource
Description Framework (RDF). As such, the Bibliographic Ontology adopts by reference both
a syntax (using XML), a data model (RDF graphs) and a mathematically
grounded definition for the rules that underpin the RDF design.
The Bibliographic Ontology is an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because the subject area we're describing – citations and bibliographic references-- has so many competing requirements that a standalone format would not capture them or would lead to trying to describe these requirements in a number of incompatible formats. By using RDF, the Bibliographic Ontology gains a powerful extensibility mechanism, allowing Bibliographic-Ontology-based descriptions to be mixed with claims made in any other RDF vocabulary.
The Bibliographic Ontology as an ontology cannot incorporate everything we might want to talk about that is related to citations and bibliographic references. Instead of covering all topics within the Bibliographic Ongoloty itself, we describe the basic topics and build into a larger framework - RDF - that allows us to take advantage of work elsewhere on more specific description vocabularies.
RDF provides the Bibliographic Ontology with a way to mix together different descriptive vocabularies in a consistent way. Vocabularies can be created by different communities and groups as appropriate and mixed together as required, without needing any centralized agreement on how terms from different vocabularies can be written down in XML or N3.
Check the Ontology namespaces referenced section to find some ontologies that ca be use in conjonction with the Bibliographic Ontology.
There are mechanisms for saying which RDF properties are connected to which classes, and how different classes are related to each other, using RDF Syntax and OWL. These can be quite general (all RDF properties by default come from an rdf:Resource for example) or very specific and precise (for example by using OWL constructs). This is another form of self-documentation, which allows you to connect different vocabularies together as you please.
In summary then, RDF is self-documenting in ways which enable the creation and combination of vocabularies in a devolved manner. This is particularly important for an ontology which describes communities, since online communities connect to many other domains of interest, which it would be impossible (as well as suboptimal) for a single group to describe adequately in non-geological time.
RDF is usually written using the XML or N3 syntaxes. If you want to process the data, you will need to use one of the many RDF toolkits available, such as Jena (Java) or Redland (C).
More information about RDF can be found in the RDF Primer.
The Bibliographic Ontology cross-reference: Classes, Properties and Individuals
Article
- A written composition in prose, usually nonfiction, on a specific topic, forming an independent part of a book or other publication, as a newspaper or magazine.
Document
- A document (noun) is a bounded physical
representation of body of information designed with the
capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document
may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational
information.
Magazine
- A periodical of magazine Articles. A magazine is a publication that is issued periodically, usually bound in a paper cover, and typically contains essays, stories, poems, etc., by many writers, and often photographs and drawings, frequently specializing in a particular subject or area, as hobbies, news, or sports.
Patent
- A document describing the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell an invention for a certain number of years.
Report
- A document describing an account or statement describing in detail an event, situation, or the like, usually as the result of observation, inquiry, etc..
Workshop
- A seminar, discussion group, or the like, that emphasizes zxchange of ideas and the demonstration and application of techniques, skills, etc.
content - This property is for a plain-text rendering of the content of a Document. While the plain-text content of an entire document could be described by this property.
editor - A person having managerial and sometimes policy-making responsibility for the editorial part of a publishing firm or of a newspaper, magazine, or other publication.
organizer - The organizer of an event; includes conference organizers, but also government agencies or other bodies that are responsible for conducting hearings.
pages - A string of non-contiguous page spans that locate a Document within a Collection. Example: 23-25, 34, 54-56. For continuous page ranges, use the pageStart and pageEnd properties.
peer reviewed - The process by which articles are chosen to be included in a refereed journal. An editorial board consisting of experts in the same field as the author review the article and decide if it is authoritative enough for publication.
Event - An arbitrary classification of a space/time region, by a cognitive agent. An event may have actively participating agents, passive factors, products, and a location in space/time.
coverage - The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant.
description - An account of the resource. Description may include but is not limited to: an abstract, a table of contents, a graphical representation, or a free-text account of the resource.
sub_event - This property provides a way to split a complex event (for example, a performance involving several musicians) into simpler ones (one event per musician).
time - Relates an event to a time object, classifying a time region (either instantaneous or having an extent). By using the Timeline ontology here, you can define event happening on a recorded track or on any media with a temporal extent.
