The Foundational Bibliographic Ontology is Released
After a year of diligent effort, Frédérick Giasson and Bruce D’Arcus have just announced the release of the Bibliographic Ontology. The Bibliontology, or BIBO for short, is a much anticipated foundational piece for the semantic Web. It is designed to provide flexible and comprehensive RDF representation of citations and bibliographic materials and collections.
One of the very exciting parts of the project is its possible use as an underlying schema for Zotero. Those familiar with this blog know I have been a Zotero fan from practically the first day of its release, and have pointed to it repeatedly as how application-capable functionality can be incorporated as a browser plug-in (based on Firefox in the case of Zotero). I’m hoping the automatic exposure of my citation and reference information as linked data via the ontology is a day now nearly at hand.
A Zotero-BIBO-exposed linked data RDF chain would dramatically change the game and prove a powerful demo and story for how all of this linked data can truly interoperate. Moreover, once that information is related to its subject contexts using UMBEL, watch the fireworks!
So again, congratulations to Fred and Bruce for a real labor of love. And, thanks to the scores of individuals who provided review and commentary on the BIBO forum during this initial development. Now that it is out in the wild, I’m sure we will see still further development and improvements.
BTW, Zitgist has been a proud sponsor and funder of Fred’s contributions to the project.
Thanks for the heads up! We’ve been storing similar information gathered from semantic extensions to Connotea as SPARQLable RDF for a while now and I’ve been meaning to update the ontology that organizes it. Sounds like the time is now..