Fwd: beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between scientific and non-scientific material

[Alan Ruttenberg]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dennis - UT <dv.ep...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 4:33 AM
Subject: beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between
scientific and non-scientific material
To: semant...@w3.org

Hi,

We are currently working on a repository for OAI ORE resource maps
(http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc). In this system we are
trying to describe relations between scientific publications and other
material (both scientific and non-scientific). To do this we are
planning to use several (RDF) vocabularies / ontologies.

A question is: how to cope with diversity in scientific disciplines
and communication on the one hand and standardizing relation
descriptions when aggregating publications about a certain topic?
Vocabularies now available (FOAF, DCterms, etc) mainly restrict to
formal relations and do not include relations concerning the content
in a more detailed way than for instance 'dc:subject'. This may be the
consequence of the diversity in scientific semantics. Is there any
literature/article about this issue?

An example case is describing relations between scientific
publications and their 'application'. For example: a publication
proposes certain changes, government policy makers later decide to
create actual policies based on this information. So far we didn’t
find any existing solution to describe such relations. Suggestions on
existing vocabularies to describe / annotate such relations are very
welcome, thanks!

Kind regards,

Dennis
University of Twente

[Melanie Courtot]

What about creating a report (IAO_0000088) or subclass of it, and
having its concretization being realized by a process (policy making
maybe), which specified information output would be the policies?

The report could have dc:subject X, or is_about X, or hasTopic (http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/swc_2009-02-27.html
) X.

If more granularity is needed, we could use "report
element" (IAO_0000091) , which is part_of report. Report element
is_about X, part_of report Y, and again its concretization would be
realized by a process. This would allow to link one specific policy to
one specific part of a paper if a paper contains several of them.

Melanie

---
Mélanie Courtot
TFL- BCCRC
675 West 10th Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V5Z 1L3, Canada