About FaBiO and CiTO

Hi all,

I’m Silvio Peroni, and I’m one of the co-author of SPAR Ontologies, that you are adopting in the current version of your amazing work on data citation, i.e., 

http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/vocab-du.html <http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/vocab-du.html>

First of all, let me say you are doing a wonderful job and, in case you think my help would be valuable for that work, I’m really happy to be involved somehow, in particular for what concern the use of SPAR Ontologies.

I’ve read the current state of the document (Dec 19) and, sorry to bother you about this, I’ve found few typos and have few questions and suggestions about some aspects of the spec, in particular those related with CiTO and FaBiO, of course. Please find my comments as follows.


# Prefixes

Both the prefixes for FaBiO and CiTO finish with a "/" rather than a "#", i.e.:

http://purl.org/spar/fabio/
http://purl.org/spar/cito/

This should be modified in the namespace declaration (section 2), and in all the examples.


# Citation acts

The property cito:isCitedBy is commonly used for relating two entities A and B (e.g., papers, a dataset and a paper, etc.) where A is cited by B. It is not used for relating and entity (such as a dataset) to a citation act (as shown in the figure is section 6), rather such entity with the entity that actually cites it. Simplifying, saying that

:A cito:isCitedBy :B .

means exactly (by using a citation act) that

:c-act-1 a cito:CitationAct ;
 cito:hasCitingEntity :B ;
 cito:hasCitedEntity :A .

See http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/cito#cito_1 for another example of that.

For expressing the relation between the dataset and the citation act you should need an inverse property of cito:hasCitedEntity. If it is needed, I would be happy to add it (as long as the inverse properties of the other citation act properties) to CiTO.


# About duv:DataCitation and fabio:Work

I have some doubts, that surely derives from my poor expertise in the model and in the discussion you had in the last months, on the difference about duv:DataCitation and fabio:Work. In principle, a citation act allows you to say that some work (e.g., a paper) cites a certain dataset. Thus, what does the duv:DataCitation class need in this scenario? I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I would like only to understand better the use case for this.

BTW, is the div:DataCitation class close to the biro:BibliographicRecord one (see http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/biro)?


# References

Both FaBiO and CiTO can be referenced by means of their official publication:
Peroni, S., Shotton, D. (2012). FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations. In Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 17 (December 2012): 33-43. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2012.08.001

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I hope these comments can be of interest for you. Please don’t hesitate to contact me for any further question and, still, I apologise if this email is inappropriate and out of topic.

Have a nice day :-)

S.



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Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2094871
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it
Web: http://www.essepuntato.it
Twitter: essepuntato