Introduction
The LD4L ontology team formed very early in the project and has met on a weekly basis for discussions on a wide range of topics, from proposing possible use cases to reviewing the ontology aspects of use cases proposed by other teams to discussing the specifics of how best to represent the data coming from our three library catalogs and from other internal and external sources.
Team members are listed on the Working Groups page, and the team has benefited from the addition of new members including strong representation from the technical services and metadata departments of Cornell, Harvard, and Stanford.
Several principles have guided our discussions and influenced the work of the team on the project. The group early on confirmed the intention stated in the proposal to reuse appropriate parts of currently available ontologies rather than building a new, self-contained ontology for LD4L. While there are advantages to working from a blank slate, we believe it makes eminent sense for a project focused on linked data to draw as much as possible on existing ontologies that already have achieved significant adoption or show promise for doing so.
At the outset the ontology team recognized the existence of a great deal of prior art in the form of published ontologies and significant ongoing ontology initiatives addressing the representation of bibliographic information in RDF. Elements of the Bibliographic Ontology and FaBIO had already been incorporated into the VIVO-ISF ontology and were familiar to team members – and Paolo Ciccarese from Harvard was a principal FABIO contributor. The BIBFRAME initiative at the Library of Congress addresses the representation of MARC metadata in RDF, while OCLC has worked to extend the Schema.org ontology as a bridge between the library community and the Web.
From the proposal
SRSIS Ontology
Because no existing ontology supports the range of entities and relationship that SRSIS will encompass, we will use the Protégé ontology editor to develop a SRSIS ontology framework that reuses appropriate parts of currently available ontologies while introducing extensions and additions where necessary. The framework will be based on and remain compatible with the existing VIVO and emerging research dataset and research resource ontology work. It will be sufficiently expressive to encompass traditional catalog metadata from both Cornell and Harvard, the basic linked data elements described in the Stanford Linked Data Workshop Technology Plan, and the usage and other contextual elements from StackLife. The ontology will capture a series of basic concepts and be structured as modules that draw inspiration from and reuse existing ontology classes and properties where appropriate, such as the Semantic Publishing and Referencing ontologies, and that also support arbitrary system-wide refinement, including local extensions.
Ontology goals
Work to date
The ontology team
References
While by no means exhaustive, the team has found these papers useful.
- The Relationship between BIBFRAME and the OCLC's Linked-Data Model of Bibliographic Description: A Working Paper. Carol Jean Godby, Senior Researc Scientist, OCLC Research, September, 2013. PDF
