Identifying Ontological Domains Related to VIVO

Michael Conlon, Violeta Ilik, Brian Lowe, Christian Hauschke, Marijane White, Muhammad Javed, Naomi Braun

Keywords: ontology, domains of representation

TL;DR: The VIVO ontology focuses on scholarship. Ontology development needs to identify domains of representation to be used by scholarship, but are independent of scholarship.

Abstract:

The VIVO ontology is focused on the domain of scholarship. But to represent scholarship we need terms and relations from other domains. For example, VIVO needs to refer to organizations – people have positions at universities, journals have publishers, memberships are offered by associations and societies. Universities, publishers, associations, and societies are organizations. Representing organizations is important for VIVO, but beyond the domain of scholarship. We need to refer to representations by those who have organizations as their domain and focus the VIVO ontology on the domain of scholarship.

VIVO was very early to the world of ontologies. When VIVO began as a semantic application in 2007, there were few good ontologies, few were actively maintained, few were focused on defined domains, and few were developed with consistent principles. Foundries (collections of ontologies with common principles) were emerging. Finding ontologies that could be relied on to build the VIVO ontology was challenging.

Organizations, Time, Locations, Research Administration, Research Resources, Journals, Languages, Academic Degrees, and Concept vocabulary, are all potentially separable from VIVO and useful beyond their use in representing scholarship. Some of these domains of representation have ontologies that might merit reuse. Others do not. Other domains of representation such as teaching, service, research impact, awards, and mentoring may not be candidates for separate ontologies at this time. Additional specialty domains need also be considered. These include national vocabularies and taxonomies, as well as those of academic disciplines such as agriculture, the performing arts, and medical research.

In creating a version 2 of the VIVO ontology, we seek to identify domains that can be represented and maintained outside of the VIVO ontology, and identify ontologies of those domains that can be reused. In some cases we will not be able to reuse the domain ontology directly, but rather refer to terms in the domain ontology.

In this poster we will present an overview of the domains commonly encountered in representing scholarship with analysis and recommendations regarding how each may be treated in version 2 of the VIVO ontology.

ORCID: 0000-0002-1304-8447

Submission Type: poster