In addition to using CiTO and CiTO4Data to describe relationships of relevance to data entities, as discussed in the previous blog post, FaBiO, the FRBR aligned Bibliographic Ontology described elsewhere, another member of the suite of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, also has a number of classes and properties specifically designed for addressing data, software, metadata and other non-bibliographic entities.

This is the first of a series of blog posts on the Open Citations blog that address the problem of citing data entities, for example a data package in a data repository, rather than bibliographic entities such as journal articles. For these purposes, the existence of DataCite to assign DOIs to datasets, and extensions to the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies to handle data items, are both important.

In the previous blog post, I made a textual comparison between BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson, and FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology.

BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson [1], was the first OWL ontology dedicated to describing bibliographic entities, and has attracted a wide group of users. It provided the much-needed ability to describe the nature of cited works in RDF to a high degree of granularity, in terms of Title, Abstract, Journal, Volume, Pages, ISSN, DOI, dataCopyrighted, editor, etc.

One of the most important need for a publisher is to categorising each bibliographic entity it produces by adding free-text keywords and/or specific terms structured according to recognised classification systems and/or thesauri specific for certain academic disciplines. Academics have the same need when annotating bibliographic references.

FRBR, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [1] is a general model, proposed by the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA), for describing bibliographic documents. It works for both physical and digital resources and has proved to be very flexible and powerful. One of the most important aspect of FRBR is the fact that it is not associated with a particular metadata schema or implementation.

CiTO v2.0 contains just two main object properties, cito:cites and its inverse cito:isCitedBy , each of which as thirty-two sub-properties. Intentionally, these properties are not constrained as to domain or range, thereby maximising their applicability in a wide range of citation contexts.

Scholarly authoring and publishing is in the throes of a revolution, as the full potential of on-line publishing is explored.

Graffoo , a Graphical Framework for OWL Ontologies [1], is a wonderful new open source tool developed by Silvio Peroni that can be used to present the classes, properties and restrictions within OWL ontologies, or sub-sections of them, as clear and easy-to-understand diagrams.

Silvio Peroni has recently created LODE (Live OWL Documentation Environment;

The last four SPAR ontologies – the Document Components Ontology DoCO, the Publishing Roles Ontology PRO, the Publishing Status  Ontology PSO and the Publishing Workflow Ontology PWO – were recently completed.  All eight SPAR ontologies have now been thoroughly revised and checked, and are stable and ready for use.