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

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