Frederick Giasson

“What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book-a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.” — The OpenLibrary Project

This is what I wanted to participate to.

The Open Library is a project that wants to archive information about every book (probably writings) created by mankind. Such a strong vision is naturally closely related to the semantic web.

I contacted Aaron Swartz about this project. I wanted to know what were their plans about making all this data available on the semantic web; what was their plan to describe these books into RDF.

I wanted to participate to the project by describing their information into RDF using the Bibliographic Ontology.

So it is what I started to do. Aaron sent me some snapshots of data using their current database schema (this schemas should be updated soon). Then I described one of them using BIBO. As you will see bellow, the ontology neatly describes the Open Library data and enable us to query, at the same time, the Open Library’s data, the data about the articles I wrote, eventually the Zotero citations if they choose to use BIBO, etc.

So, bellow is my proposition to Aaron and to the Open Library Project. From this post, we will be able to discuss about the implications, how this could be done, how the data could be made available for querying and browsing, etc.

How to Cook Revised Edition described using RDF and BIBO

The current use case is a book by Raymond Sokolov: “How to Cook Revised Edition“. It has been straightforward to map this data into BIBO using the current proposition.

The RDF/N3 example is available here: How to Cook Revised Edition in RDF/N3

Describing this data using BIBO leaded me to find out how to describe topical subjects of documents. It is a discussion we (the BIBO development community) already had, and here I think I found a solution.

Describing topical subjects for a bibo:Document

The goal is to relate a document resource with the concepts describing their topics. There are many ways to describe subjects of documents: it could be with a literal, a class, an individual, etc.

What I am proposing here is to re-use the dcterms:subject property (has we already do) to relate a bibo:Document with the concept of a taxonomy that will acts has the topical subject of a document.

The Open Library is using the BISAC subject standard to relate books with their topics. What I have done is to describe the BISAC standard as a taxonomy in RDF using SKOS. The resulting RDF is: BISAC taxonomy snapshot.

As you can notice, the BISAC taxonomy structure is well-described using SKOS concepts. The relation between these concepts is described as well. Also, the dcterm:identifier property is used to link a concept with its BISAC identifier.

From there, we only have to use the BISAC URIs to link a bibo:Document to its subjects like:

dcterms:subject <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/bisac#Cooking_Regional_and_Ethnic_American_General> ;
dcterms:subject <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/bisac#Cooking_General> ;

This is simple and effective. Also, we are not limited to the BISAC taxonomy; one can use the taxonomy he wants to describe subjects of its documents.

Some SPARQL queries

Nothing is better than SPARQL queries to “feel” the power of these RDF descriptions.

Queries related to contributions

The following query will display the documents’ title and the contribution role of Raymond Sokolov. So, if Raymond contributed to some documents as an author and editor, and all these documents will be returned in the resultset:

Finding documents where Raymond Sokolov contributed
The following query is a variable of the above. It will returns all the documents’ title where Raymond is an author.

Finding documents where Raymond Sokolov contributed as an author

Eventually we could also use the bibo:position to know all the documents wrote by Raymond where its author position if less than 2 (so, where he is a primary or secondary author of a document).

Queries related to documents and their subjects

If a user only has the BISAC identification number of a concept, and that he needs to find books about this topic, then he only has to run this query to get the titles with that topic:

Finding documents related to a BISAC identifier

However, it is not really handy. What if I only want books about “cooking”? There is a way to go:

Finding documents about “cooking”

That way, you will get all the “cooking” related concepts from the taxonomy, and you will find all the related books.

Note that there are many other ways to go such as browsing the graph of concepts using the skos:narrower and skos:broader properties from a given skos:Concept. However, the query above is simple and effective.

Other queries

Otherwise you can create a full set of other simple and effective queries by searching all the published books, all the published books by a given author or editor, etc.

There is no limit when all that information is available in RDF and BIBO.

More descriptions of the Open Library using BIBO

If you take a closer look at the current database schemas of the Open Library Project, you will notice that have data about “series”, “notes”, and other things. I don’t have such an example in hands at the moment, but we have to keep in mind that we can easily describe them using BIBO as well.

Conclusion

I described how RDF and The Bibliographic Ontology could be use to describe data from The Open Library Project. Doing this would enable them to easily and effectively publish their data so that other people and applications could take advantage of it.

We also found that it is a powerful method that we can easily use to search complex graphs of relations created by such data described in RDF and BIBO.

Finally, having all this data available in BIBO will enable us to easily merge it with other document data sources such as Zotero or any other writings described using RDF and BIBO. As a final example, we could, for example, find all the documents that Raymond Sokolov contributed to create, as an author, and editor, or whatever. With a single query, once could find out that he wrote some published books, and that he authored some posts on its blog. All that thanks to the RDF, BIBO, SPARQL and all the data sources exporting their data using RDF and BIBO.

The Bibliographic Ontology let you describe all these things, and much more, in RDF. In the last months the community developing BIBO has been quite fruitful. Many questions have been asked, many have been answered, and things are slowly getting shape.

It is for that reason that I started to create some more examples using the ontology; trying to see how people will use it; etc. I created some examples to see if I could easily describe two articles I wrote in the past few years: (1) and accepted article in a proceeding and (2) a refused article submitted for a conference. I was wondering if the current state of the ontology could easily cope with some weird cases. As you will notice bellow, it nicely described some weird cases that I encountered while describing these articles.

First example: Describing a Series, with volumes and articles

I wanted to describe an article I wrote with Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant and John Breslin. This article is part of a proceeding that is published in a series, as a volume (248). The series have a ISSN; however it is only published online (no paper is version available).

There is how BIBO describe such a case:

A Complex series + proceeding + article use case in RDF/XML

The series is a bibo:Series. This series has a title, a short title and a ISSN. Also, it is in relation with its publisher and has a status (published). Finally, this series is put in relation with its volume and a web document (a web page) that is a manifestation of the series.

This is something to have in mind for the remaining of this blog post: in BIBO, a web page is a document, like any other document. The only difference between a paper book and a webpage is their identifier(locator): a published paper book will have a ISBN, and a web page will have a URL. This said, we easily relates different documents’ formats using dcterms:relation. That way, we explicit a relation between two different documents (event if they only difference is their format (printer on paper, html, pdf, etc)).

After I described the proceeding that has been published. It is a bibo:Proceeding that has some properties, but particularly a bibo:volume property that describe its location into the series. Finally, the editors of the proceeding are described and are related to the proceeding they edited via a bibo:Contribution.

Contributions are at the core of the ontology; they are defined as:

“The contribution a person, group or organization makes to the creation or realization of a work.”

So, an editor and an author are contributors to the creation or realization of a work (a document).

Finally I described the article that is a bibo:Article. I described its properties, its authors, and the relation between the authors and the article. I also described its status: it has been peer-reviewed and has been published.

The links between the series, the proceeding and the article has been done by re-using the properties dcterms:hasPart and dcterms:isPartOf.

Second example: a rejected article submitted to a conference

For that second example, I wanted to describe an article I wrote a couple of years ago, that I submitted to a conference and that has been rejected. So, I had to describe the article, the conference, and the fact that it has been rejected after peer-reviewing.

There is how BIBO describes this use case:

Rejected article submitted to a conference in RDF/XML

This is basically the same thing has the above: describing a document with its authors.

However, in that case, I had to describe a conference. The Bibliographic Ontology use The Event Ontology to describe such things. The conference event has been described using the even:Event class, along with event:agent that relates the event with the organization that created the event and event:place that locates the event in the World.

However, the description of conference events will change in the next few weeks since Yves Raimond and me will create an extension module to this ontology to specifically describes conference events (so, we will talk about event:Conference, and event:organizer and event:sponsors, etc.).

Finally, I had something to say about this article I wrote. To say it, I created another type of document called a bibo:Note to annotate this document with some comments. A bibo:Note is a document of its own, like a bibo:Article. However, I relates the two documents (the bibo:Note and the bibo:Article) using the bibo:annotates property. That way, I describe the fact that a document is an annotation to another document.

Conclusion

These two examples explain how The Bibliographic Ontology can be used to describe some complex bibliographic use cases. It is just a start, and many questions are yet to be answered by the bibliographic ontology. However, many things are going forward and if you have been interested by this demonstration, I can only suggest you to join the community supporting BIBO’s development and help it evolving.