HTML metadata for journal articles by Alf Eaton.
From the post:
You’d think it would be easy to pin down an ontology for journal articles. There are basically just these properties:
- title
- authors[]
- datePublished
- abstract
But… some of those are shared with more generic classes higher up the tree, so abtract becomes description, title becomes name, author becomes creator. Each author can be a string or an object. Each author has one or more affiliations, which have addresses. The authors are in a specific order, and some of them have certain roles. There are several different dates: creation, review, update, publication.
A good listing of all the various options for bibliographic metadata.
A variety that arose in the last ten (10) years. If we pushed that back twenty (20) or thirty (30) years, even more diversity.
All of the systems mentioned are useful in their original contexts and will be supplanted by other systems over time.
But unlike humans, the components of the so-called “Semantic Web” don’t adapt to change. Or should I say they don’t adapt without the assistance of their human authors?
Any change to an ontology forces more work onto their maintainers. Perhaps that accounts for static ontologies that don’t account for prior diversity or that will will surely follow.
I have always thought, “X works with my software,” as a poor reason to adopt any particular approach. I much prefer approaches that meet my requirements, not those of a software vendor.
I first saw this in a tweet by Duncan Hull.