University of Oxford

David M. Shotton

[In the [previous blog
post](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/comparison-of-bibo-and-fabio/),
I made a textual comparison between
[BIBO](http://bibliontology.com/specification) v1.3, the Bibliographic
Ontology developed by Bruce D'Arcus and Frédérick Giasson, and
[FaBiO](http://purl.org/spar/fabio/), the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic
Ontology.]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[In this post, I wish to introduce our RDF mapping of BIBO (version 1.3,
undated, downloaded from
[[http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/]{style="color: navy;text-decoration: underline"}](http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/))
to the [SPAR](http://purl.org/spar/) (Semantic Publishing and
Referencing) Ontologies, particularly to FaBiO (version 1.1, dated
23-06-2011, downloadable from
[[http://purl.org/spar/fabio/]{style="color: navy;text-decoration: underline"}](http://purl.org/spar/fabio/)),
to permit cross-walk between these two systems.
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[The mapping takes the form of an alphabetical listing of all BIBO
classes, object properties and data properties, for each of which is
provided a
[[SKOS]{style="color: navy;text-decoration: underline"}](http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-skos-reference-20090818/)
mapping to equivalent classes, object properties or data properties in
FaBiO or one of the other SPAR ontologies, or to relevant terms in
[FRBR](http://purl.org/spar/frbr/),
[PRISM](http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/2.0/),
[FOAF](http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/),
[SKOS](http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/) or [Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative Terms](http://purl.org/dc/terms/), where such a mapping is
possible. Where it is not, a note is included to explain why.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[Note that most of the classes in FaBiO are arranged according to the
FRBR data model into *fabio:Works* (69 sub-classes), *fabio:Expressions*
(92 sub-classes), *fabio:Manifestations* (10 sub-classes) and
*fabio:Items* (4 sub-classes). 38 of the BIBO classes are sub-classes of
*bibo:Document*, which roughly corresponds to *fabio:Expression*.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[Note also that, because of the ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings
of the word "document", FaBiO intentionally lacks the class
*fabio:Document*, using instead the generic term *fabio:Expression* and
more specific sub-classes. In contrast, BIBO classifies things as
diverse as films, slideshows and web pages as sub-classes of
*bibo:Document*.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[Note further that BIBO contains classes that describe social events,
such as *bibo:Interview* and *bibo:Performance*, and that describe
specific legal documents such as *bibo:LegalDecision* and
*bibo:Legislation*. These have no equivalents in the SPAR Ontologies.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[The mapping document,
[BIBO2SPAR](https://sempublishing.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sempublishing/SPAR/BIBO2SPAR.ttl),
is written as validated RDF in [[Turtle
format]{style="color: navy;text-decoration: underline"}](http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/),
and is available at
[[https://sempublishing.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sempublishing/SPAR/BIBO2SPAR.ttl]{style="color: navy;text-decoration: underline"}](https://sempublishing.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/sempublishing/SPAR/BIBO2SPAR.ttl)  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[In the mappings, the BIBO class or property name is given on the left
of each line, followed by the SKOS mapping relationship and the
equivalent class or property name used in the SPAR ontologies, e.g.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[bibo:AudioDocument skos:exactMatch fabio:AudioDocument .  
]{style="font-family: Courier New;font-size: 10pt"}

[This mapping document has been prepared by and is copyright © David
Shotton, University of Oxford, and Silvio Peroni, University of Bologna,
23 June 2011, and is published as open data under a Creative Commons 2.5
attribution license.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}

[Please contact \<david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk\> or
\<speroni@cs.unibo.it\> for further information.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 12pt"}


In the previous blog post, I made a textual comparison between BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson, and FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology.

BIBO2SPAR, an RDF Mapping of BIBO to the SPAR Ontologies

[[BIBO]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}](http://bibliontology.com/specification)[
v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D'Arcus and
Frédérick Giasson \[1\], was the first OWL ontology dedicated to
describing bibliographic entities, and has attracted a wide group of
users. It provided the much-needed ability to describe the nature of
cited works in RDF to a high degree of granularity, in terms of Title,
Abstract, Journal, Volume, Pages, ISSN, DOI, dataCopyrighted, editor,
etc.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}

[[FaBiO]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}](http://purl.org/spar/fabio/)[,
the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, which was created more recently
and was introduced in a [previous blog
post](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/16) \[2\], bears many
similarities with BIBO, including its overall scope and intention, and
the inclusion of PRISM and DC Terms data properties. A clear comparison
of these two ontologies, and the provision of a mapping between them, is
long overdue.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}

[The primary differences between FaBiO and BIBO are as follows:  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}

1.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [While BIBO is a 'flat' ontology, FaBiO is structured according to
    the [FRBR conceptual
    model](http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records),
    in which publication entities are described from four different and
    correlated points of view, those of *Work*, *Expression*,
    *Manifestation* and *Item*, each of which is a FRBR *Endeavour*, as
    defined in a [previous blog
    post](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/extending-frbr-within-fabio/).
    This structure has been introduced to provide greater expressivity.
    For example, using FaBiO one can describe a *fabio:ResearchPaper*
    that can be published as a *fabio:JournalArticle*, or alternatively
    as a *fabio:ConferencePaper* or a *fabio:BookChapter*. BIBO has the
    class *bibo:AcademicArticle*, which conflated the two concepts
    *ResearchPaper* (a conceptual Work) and *JournalArticle* (an
    Expression of that Work).  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

2.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [Great care has been taken to make the textual definitions of FaBiO
    classes accurate and expressive. Thus, while BIBO's definition of
    *bibo:Standard* is "A document describing a standard", FaBiO
    describes *fabio:TechnicalStandard*, which is a subclass of
    fabio:Specification, as "An official or public specification of, or
    requirement for, a technical method, practice, process or protocol
    that is involved in, for example, manufacturing, computation,
    electronic communication, or digital media."  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

3.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [FaBiO is larger than BIBO (211 rather than 69 classes, 69 rather
    than 52 object properties, 45 rather than 54 data properties, and 16
    rather than 15 individuals), permitting greater expressivity.  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

4.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [BIBO has a slight subject specialism in the area of legal documents
    (including *bibo:Bill*, *bibo:Brief*, *bibo:CourtReporter*,
    *bibo:LegalCaseDocument*, *bibo:Statue*). In addition to covering
    conventional scholarly works, BIBO also covers a few things outside
    the immediate realm of bibliographic entities, including social
    events (e.g. *bibo:Hearing*, *bibo:Interview*, *bibo:Performance*)
    and personal roles (e.g. *bibo:interviewer*, *bibo:performer*,
    *bibo:producer*). In contrast, FaBiO was developed to describe
    anything a research scientist might need to reference. Thus it lacks
    legal classes but includes classes that betray a preoccupation with
    academia and publications (e.g. *fabio:ExaminationPaper*,
    *fabio:Preprint*, *fabio:SupplementaryInformationFile*), funding and
    IPR (e.g. *fabio:GrantApplication*, *fabio:PatentApplication*),
    biomedical research (e.g. *fabio:ClinicalTrialDesign*,
    *fabio:SystematicReview*), research data (e.g. *fabio:Dataset*,
    *fabio:Metadata*, *fabio:DataBase*, *fabio:DataRepository*),
    computing (e.g. *fabio:Algorithm*, *fabio:ComputerProgram*), web
    communication (e.g. *fabio:BlogPost*, *fabio:WikiEntry*) and
    ontologies (e.g. *fabio:ControlledVocabulary*, *fabio:Ontology*,
    *fabio:Thesaurus*, *fabio:Taxonomy*), none of which are present in
    BIBO.  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

5.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [FaBiO is not a stand-alone ontology, but is one of the
    [SPAR](http://purl.org/spar/) (Semantic Publishing and Referencing)
    Ontologies, a suite of complementary and orthogonal ontologies
    outlined in two previous blog posts
    \[[2](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/introducing-the-semantic-publishing-and-referencing-spar-ontologies/),
    [3](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/new-web-site-for-the-spar-ontologies/)\],
    that cover all aspects of publishing, referencing and bibliographic
    endeavour.  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

6.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [FaBiO and the other SPAR ontologies are written in OWL 2 DL,
    enabling them to be used in the Semantic Web with appropriate
    reasoners. In contrast, BIBO is in OWL Full, since it includes the
    RDF resources *rdf:List*, *rdf:Seq* and *rdfs:Resource* and the
    property *rdf:value* that cannot be included in proper OWL2 DL
    ontologies.  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

7.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [BIBO contains a few elements that are not present within FaBiO, but
    that have equivalent elements within some of the other SPAR
    ontologies:  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

    1.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
        [the object properties *bibo:cites* and *bibo:isCitedBy* have
        equivalent properties in [CiTO](http://purl.org/spar/cito/), the
        Citation Typing Ontology, where they have 32 sub-properties
        lacking in BIBO;  
        ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
        :::

    2.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
        [classes to describe component parts of documents (e.g.
        *bibo:DocumentPart*) that are covered in
        [DoCO](http://purl.org/spar/doco/), the Document Components
        Ontology;  
        ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
        :::

    3.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
        [classes and properties to describe the status of documents
        (e.g. *bibo:DocumentStatus*, *bibo:status*), that are covered in
        [PSO](http://purl.org/spar/pso/), the Publication Status
        Ontology.  
        ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
        :::

8.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [FaBiO and CiTO have been harmonized \[4\] with the
    [SWAN](http://swan.mindinformatics.org/ontology.html) (Semantic Web
    Applications in Neuromedicine) ontology ecosystem developed by Tim
    Clark and Paolo Ciccarese of Harvard University, which covers the
    domain of scientific discourse in general, with particular
    application to neuromedicine, and which is used particularly useful
    for characterizing rhetorical structures between documents. Since
    SWAN had been previously harmonized with the
    [SIOC](http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/) (Semantically-Interlinked Online
    Communities) ontology for describing blogs, wikis and discussion
    groups, this provides the basis of a powerful new web framework for
    scientific communications.  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

9.  ::: {style="text-align: justify"}
    [For categorising bibliographic resources, FaBiO has been integrated
    with and extends SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System
    \[5\] that supports the use of thesauri, classification schemes,
    subject heading lists, taxonomies and other knowledge organization
    systems within the framework of the Semantic Web, as described in a
    [previous blog
    post](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/categorising-bibliographic-resources-with-fabio-and-skos/).  
    ]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}
    :::

[The choice of whether to use BIBO or FaBiO depends upon whether BIBO
possesses sufficient expressiveness for the task in hand, whether the
user is prepared to put in the small degree of extra effort required to
engage with the layered FRBR structure of FaBiO rather than the flat
structure of BIBO, whether one requires the semantic reasoning support
of an OWL 2 DL ontology, and whether the user requires integration with
other ontologies such as CiTO and SWAN, that FaBiO provides.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}

[To assist existing users of BIBO and the SPAR Ontologies to map between
these two systems, we have used SKOS to prepare an RDF mapping document,
BIBO2SPAR, that we describe in the [following blog
post](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/113 "bibi2spar"){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman"}

[\[1\] Bruce D'Arcus and Frédérick Giasson (2009). Bibliographic
Ontology Specification. Specification Document, 4 November 2009.
<http://bibliontology.com/specification>.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 9pt"}

[\[2\] David Shotton (2010) Introducing the Semantic Publishing and
Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies. JISC Open Citations Blog, 14 October
2010. <https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/16>.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 9pt"}

[\[3\] David Shotton (2011) New web site for the SPAR ontologies. JISC
Open Citations Blog, 25 February 2011.
<https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/55>.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 9pt"}

[\[4\] Ciccarese P, Shotton D, Peroni S and Clark T (2011) CiTO + SWAN:
The Web Semantics of Bibliographic Records, Citations, Evidence and
Discourse Relationships. (Submitted for publication).  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 9pt"}

[\[5\] Miles, A., Bechhofer, S. (2009). SKOS Simple Knowledge
Organization System Reference. W3C Recommendation, 18 August 2009. World
Wide Web Consortium.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-skos-reference-20090818/>.  
]{style="font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: 9pt"}


BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson [1], was the first OWL ontology dedicated to describing bibliographic entities, and has attracted a wide group of users. It provided the much-needed ability to describe the nature of cited works in RDF to a high degree of granularity, in terms of Title, Abstract, Journal, Volume, Pages, ISSN, DOI, dataCopyrighted, editor, etc.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

BIBO2SPAR, an RDF Mapping of BIBO to the SPAR Ontologies

Comparison of BIBO and FaBiO