Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> Re: the use of bibtex:article - it seems frustrating to have to pull
> in *so* many different ontologies to express bibliographic
> information. The bibtex ontology overlaps with the PRISM ontology
> quite a lot, no? So pulling it in seems in some sense messy - but
> maybe I'm not looking at this in the right way.
Yes, and no. I'm symphathetic to your perspective in the sense that
some cohesion is valuable. OTOH, RDF encourages the notion of using
different vocabularies where appropriate.
It does seems strange that one needs four different vocabularies for one
domain though.
> But it seems to me that it would really help to have an ontology that
> pulled together what is needed to serve the practical needs of
> publishers than the messy ad hoc combinations of
> Bibtex/FOAF/RSS/DC/PRISM (but which could of course express
> equivalences with those ontologies)
>
> Analagous to the National Library of Medicine's publisher DTD.
> dtd.nlm.nih.gov Maybe the NLM can be persuaded to create (or
> endorse) an associated bibliographic ontology?
Having been through some of this, I'm a little suspicious of having to
deal with large orgnizations. There's enough expertise just on this list
to be able to do this if necessary, or at least agree on a standard way
of mixing existing vocabs (though I think there's at least need for a
standardized type ontology for bib data; bibtex doesn't cut it).
I was just talking to Tony Hammond at Nature last week about putting
together a proposal to enhance PRISM for more scholarly needs. So
there's promise there.
And Rich Newman put together a list that's mostly been about the new
FRBR ontology:
http://holygoat.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/sw-bib_holygoat.co.uk
As for me, I'm interested in this for two reasons: first, for my own
metadata needs as a scholar, and second, because as co-project lead for
the OpenOffice bibliographic project, I need to write a proposal soon
for upgrading the standard bib representation in the OpenDocument file
format spec. I had been planning to recommend the MODS XML Schema, but
am growing uncomfortable with that.
Bruce
Received on Wed Sep 14 2005 - 17:52:13 EDT