Silvio Peroni

FaBiO and CiTO: Ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

Semantic publishing is the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance the meaning of a published journal article, to facilitate its automated discovery, to enable its linking to semantically related articles, to provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and to facilitate integration of data between articles. Recently, semantic publishing has opened the possibility of a major step forward in the digital publishing world. For this to succeed, new semantic models and visualization tools are required to fully meet the specific needs of authors and publishers. In this article, we introduce the principles and architectures of two new ontologies central to the task of semantic publishing: FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, an ontology for recording and publishing bibliographic records of scholarly endeavours on the Semantic Web, and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, an ontology for the characterization of bibliographic citations both factually and rhetorically. We present those two models step by step, in order to emphasise their features and to stress their advantages relative to other pre-existing information models. Finally, we review the uptake of FaBiO and CiTO within the academic and publishing communities.

Identifying Key Concepts in an Ontology, through the Integration of Cognitive Principles with Statistical and Topological Measures

In this paper we address the issue of identifying the concepts in an ontology, which best summarize what the ontology is about. Our approach combines a number of criteria, drawn from cognitive science, network topology, and lexical statistics. In the paper we show two versions of our algorithm, which have been evaluated against the results produced by human experts. We report that the latest version of the algorithm performs very well, exhibiting an excellent degree of correlation with the choices of the experts. While the generation of automatic methods for ontology summarization is an interesting research issue in itself, the work described here also provides a basis for novel approaches to a variety of ontology engineering tasks, including ontology matching, automatic classification, ontology modularization, and ontology evaluation.

A novel approach to visualizing and navigating ontologies

There is empirical evidence that the user interaction metaphors used in ontology engineering toolkits are largely inadequate and that novel interactive frameworks for human ontology interaction are needed. Here we present a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, called KC Viz, which exploits an innovative ontology summarization method to support a ’middleout ontology browsing’ approach, where it becomes possible to navigate ontologies starting from the most information-rich nodes (i.e., key concepts). This approach is similar to map-based visualization and navigation in Geographical Information Systems, where, e.g., major cities are displayed more prominently than others, depending on the current level of granularity.

Modelling OWL Ontologies with Graffoo

In this paper we introduce Graffoo, i.e., a graphical notation to develop OWL ontologies by means of yEd, a free editor for diagrams.

The live OWL documentation environment: a tool for the automatic generation of ontology documentation

In this paper we introduce LODE, the Live OWL Documentation Environment, an online service that automatically generates a human-readable description of any OWL ontology (or, more generally, an RDF vocabulary), taking into account both ontological axioms and annotations, and ordering these with the appearance and functionality of a W3C Recommendations document. This documentation is presented to the user as an HTML page with embedded links for ease of browsing and navigation. We have tested LODEs completeness and usability by recording the success of test users in completing tasks of ontology comprehension, and here present the results of that study.

Setting our bibliographic references free: towards open citation data

Purpose – Citation data needs to be recognised as a part of the Commons – those works that are freely and legally available for sharing – and placed in an open repository. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – The Open Citation Corpus is a new open repository of scholarly citation data, made available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 public domain dedication and encoded as Open Linked Data using the SPAR Ontologies. Findings – The Open Citation Corpus presently provides open access (OA) to reference lists from 204,637 articles from the OA Subset of PubMed Central, containing 6,325,178 individual references to 3,373,961 unique papers. Originality/value – Scholars, publishers and institutions may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the open citation data for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law.

The Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies

One of the main research areas in semantic publishing is the development of semantic models that fit the requirements of authors and publishers. Although several models and metadata schemas have been developed in the past, they do not fully comply with the vocabulary used by publishers or they are not adequate for describing specific topics (e.g., characterisation of bibliographic citations, definition of publishing roles, description of publishing workflows, etc.). In this chapter I introduce the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, a suite of orthogonal and complementary OWL 2 DL ontology modules for the creation of comprehensive machine-readable RDF metadata for every aspect of semantic publishing and referencing. In particular, I show the characteristics and benefits of all the SPAR ontologies, and support the entire discussion with several examples of Turtle code describing a particular reference of the legal discipline, namely Casanovas et al.’s “OPJK and DILIGENT: ontology modelling in a distributed environment”.

Multi-layer markup and ontological structures in Akoma Ntoso

The XML documents that represent legal resources contain information and legal knowledge that belong to many distinct conceptual layers. This paper shows how the Akoma Ntoso standard keeps these layers well separated while providing ontological structures on top of them. Additionally, this paper illustrates how Akoma Ntoso allows multiple interpretations, provided by different agents, over the same set of texts and concepts and how current semantic technologies can use these interpretations to reason on the underlying legal texts.

Dealing with markup semantics

The correct interpretation of markup semantics is necessary for the semantic interpretation of linguistic expressions that use markup in their structuring and for enabling sophisticated operation on markup documents, such as semantic validation, multi-format document conversion and searching on heterogeneous digital libraries. The semantics of XML-based markup languages is usually provided informally, for example through textual descriptions in the specification of the language. While the syntax of XML-based languages is entirely machine-readable, its semantics is obscure for machines. Semantic Web technologies can be useful for filling the gap between the well-defined syntax of a language and the informal specification of its semantics. In this paper we show how to integrate LMM, an OWL vocabulary that represents some core semiotic notions, with EARMARK, a model for the specification of semantic and structural characteristics of markup languages, in order to provide a better understanding of the semantics of markup.

The Document Components Ontology (DoCO)

The availability in machine-readable form of descriptions of the structure of documents, as well as of the document discourse (e.g. the scientific discourse within scholarly articles), is crucial for facilitating semantic publishing and the overall comprehension of documents by both users and machines. In this paper we introduce DoCO, the Document Components Ontology, an OWL 2 DL ontology that provides a general-purpose structured vocabulary of document elements to describe both structural and rhetorical document components in RDF. In addition to describing the formal description of the ontology, this paper showcases its utility in practice in a variety of our own applications and other activities of the Semantic Publishing community that rely on DoCO to annotate and retrieve document components of scholarly articles.