As promised, I’ll write a bit about using Bibliographic Ontology Specification (BIBO) over as bibliontology.com. I have written a basic XSLT to create a HTML GUI (open the RDF source in e.g. Firefox). Really basic: it only converts articles, and even assumes some conventions I found in examples in the BIBO wiki. I have not spotted a BIBO validator yet, so guessing a bit. The BibTeX mapping examples are under discussion, but provide some insight to those who are used to using that (JabRef users, for example).

So, if I understood the specs enough, the following should be valid BIBO (at least it is valid RDF):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl"
                 href="http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/bibo2xhtml.xsl"
                 ?>
<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:bibo="http://purl.org/ontology/biblio/"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
      xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
>

  <bibo:Journal rdf:about="urn:issn:1471-2105">
    <dc:title>BMC Bioinformatics</dc:title>
  </bibo:Journal>

  <bibo:Article rdf:about="http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-8-59">
    <dc:title>Bioclipse: an open source workbench for chemo- and bioinformatics</dc:title>
    <dc:date>2007-02-22</dc:date>
    <dc:isPartOf rdf:resource="urn:issn:1471-2105"/>
    <bibo:volume>8</bibo:volume>
    <bibo:doi>10.1186/1471-2105-8-59</bibo:doi>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Ola Spjuth"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>1</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Tobias Helmus"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>2</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Egon Willighagen"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>3</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Stefan Kuhn"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>4</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Martin Eklund"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>5</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Johannes Wagener"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>6</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Peter Murray-Rust"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>7</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Christoph Steinbeck"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>8</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

    <bibo:contribution>
      <bibo:Contribution>
        <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
        <bibo:contributor><foaf:Person foaf:name="Jarl Wikberg"/></bibo:contributor>
        <bibo:position>9</bibo:position>
      </bibo:Contribution>
    </bibo:contribution>

  </bibo:Article>

</rdf:RDF>

There are some things notable about this markup:

  1. It is very verbose, even for XML standards!
  2. It’s RDF from the ground up
  3. it reuses many other ontologies

Particularly, the authors section is very verbose. However, it also nicely reuses FOAF here. This makes it really powerful. For example, I could have used this bit:

<bibo:contribution>
  <bibo:Contribution>
    <bibo:role rdf:resource="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/roles/author" />
    <bibo:contributor rdf:resource="http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/foaf.xml#me"/>
    <bibo:position>3</bibo:position>
  </bibo:Contribution>
</bibo:contribution>

This would semantically link this publication to whatever information I have on myself published in my FOAF file.

Now, the reason why I have not done this yet, is that the XSLT did not properly load the XML from my foaf file:

<xsl:variable name="foafURI" select="substring-before(bibo:contributor/@rdf:resource, '#')"/>
<xsl:variable name="authorID" select="substring-after(bibo:contributor/@rdf:resource, '#')"/>
<xsl:variable name="foafDoc" select="document($foafURI)"/>
<xsl:value-of select="$foafDoc//foaf:Person[@rdf:ID=$authorID]"/>

The XSLT processor xsltproc (version 1.1.22 on Ubuntu 8.04) gives this error: warning: failed to load external entity "http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/foaf.xml". But, if I make it a relative, it does work. Both with xsltproc as well as with Firefox online.

Another reason not to do it like that, is that one looses control of the citation content. What I will do soon, is use this set up, making researcherid.com obsolete (see also these three blogs):

<bibo:contributor>
  <foaf:Person foaf:name="Egon Willighagen">
    <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/biblio.xml#me"/>
  </foaf:Person>
</bibo:contributor>

Just in case you are wondering, “why the ### does he not simply use BibTeX?”, the answer is RDF. No RDF, no SPARQL, no GLORY. Just thing how easy it will become to run a queries like:

  • which of those I have published with, run a blog
  • which of those I have published with are going to that conference in Boston in September?
  • which of those I have published with have friends who published about topics around these keywords
  • etc…

All that becomes very easy now.

BTW, this is how I link to my bibliography from my FOAF:

<foaf:publications rdf:resource="http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/people/egonw/biblio.xml"/>

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-foaf-network-3-my-publications.html.