FaBIO and CiTO: Ontologies for Describing Bibliographic Resources and Citations

Abstract

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.

Keywords: OWL, publication characterization, scholarly reference, semantic publishing