Redefining the concept
Aparajita
Have joined the group and have research interest in the area of
bibliographic ontology. I m not sure about the subject background of
you all, as have joined the group today itself :-).
I was wondering how are you planning to approach each resource for
ontology creation, as a computer scientist (who believes in indexing
all the proabable aspects) or an information professional (using the
good old library techniques of defining each resource).
cheers..
Frederick Giasson
> Have joined the group and have research interest in the area of
> bibliographic ontology. I m not sure about the subject background of
>
Great! Would it be possible to know what are your research related to
bibliographic ontologies? It could be a good knowledge input to the project.
> you all, as have joined the group today itself :-).
>
>
Well, as you can see on my homepage, my background is in computer
sciences and the semantic web. And as I said, I am not an expert the
bibliographic references domain, but as I said in a blog post is that I
started this project to try to fix what didn't work for me with the
current available ontologies.
> I was wondering how are you planning to approach each resource for
> ontology creation, as a computer scientist (who believes in indexing
> all the proabable aspects) or an information professional (using the
> good old library techniques of defining each resource).
>
Why not both? :)
Well, the path we should take (it is my opinion, but it can changes with
your input) is the same as we took for the development of the Music
Ontology.
There a list of steps (not in order) and goals of the development of the
ontology:
- Have to check what have been done. Analyzing how people currently use
the existing ontologies. Which are the most popular, etc.
- Have to check who could use this ontology, and what it could use it
for. Zotero? Well, how they would use it. Amazon.com? Well, how they
would use it. Me, you and anybody else in the World? Well, how could we
use it?
- Drilling down a "document" creation workflow. (here, document can be
anything. This step should outline the major concepts of the ontology).
- From the workflow, we should specify each concepts (probably based on
FRBR as foundation).
- All the way long, we should have in mind how the "graphs" generated by
this ontology could be queried.
- Each "node" of the workflow should act as an anchor point to extend
the ontology for specific purposes.
- Re-using as much as possible other already-in-place ontologies.
- Creating a list of things we want to be able to describe using this
ontology.
- Anything else?
One thing that is important is the "creation workflow". Yes we are
talking about a bibliographic ontology. However, if a bibliographic
reference exists, it is because someone, somewhere, created/wrote that
document. This is what this workflow is all about: the creation of a
Work to its publication (so the creation of its bibliographic reference).
Using that method to develop the ontology will enable us to not only
describing the bibliographic reference of a document, but also the steps
that leaded to the creation of that document. It is where the "levels of
expressiveness" of the ontology come in.
Most people would only need to use that ontology to describe the author
of an author and its bibliographic reference. Most of these properties
will be re-use of existing properties from other ontologies (FOAF, DC, etc.)
However, other people could want to describe all the steps that leaded
to the creation of that document. Who is the author, the editor, the
publisher, the corrector, the translator, etc. What other version of
this document exists, they are translated in which language. Also, one
could one to describe the content of a document using some taxonomy, the
main topics, etc.
The simplest thing to the hardest thing to describe in the workflow of
the creation of a document should be possible to be described using this
ontology.
Finally, we should think about that ontology as a best practice guide to
express these sort of things.
This is only the beginning, the brainstorming is continuing.
Take care,
Fred