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1. The following is the Author’s accepted manuscript, published with few changes in
Challenges and opportunities for Knowledge Organization in the digital age.
Proceedings of the fifteenth International ISKO conference, Porto, July 9-11 2018.
Edited by Fernanda Ribeiro and Maria Elisa Cerveira, Baden-Baden, Ergon Verlag,
2018, p. 501-510
Maria Teresa Biagetti
A comparative analysis and evaluation of bibliographic
ontologies
Abstract
This paper evaluates two bibliographic ontologies developed by computer scientists alone, without the
contributions of knowledge organization (KO) scholars: the Bibliographic Ontology (Bibo) and FaBiO (FRBR-
aligned Bibliographic Ontology). The aim of the study is to analyse their classes and properties, evaluate the
use of the categories in Bibo, verify the alignment with FRBR in FaBiO, and check the consistency of the
definitions of the classes with the categories that belong to the catalographic field. Finally, the study evaluates
the properties presented in Bibo and FaBiO checking them against the properties in Bibframe 2.0. The paper
presents tables of comparison between the classes of FaBiO and the FRBR categories, also considering the
IFLA-LRM high-level conceptual model. Moreover, it offers a mapping between FaBiO and Bibo properties
and the Bibframe 2.0 properties, stressing the low number of properties of FaBiO and Bibo compared with
Bibframe 2.0 properties.
Introduction
Ontologies hold an essential role in building linked open data (LOD) to enhance the
Semantic Web. They offer a tool to express semantically qualified relationships in the
realization of RDF triples and the possibility of linking data from different dataset.
As Tim Berners-Lee (2006) has asserted, at the highest level the process of LOD
creation allows connection of data within the Web to enrich information by interlinking
structured data from different sources. Ontologies are used to define suitable and
qualified relationships in the process of realizing RDF triples, and, as a result, to improve
semantic interoperability. Among the ontologies used in the process of interlinking,
FOAF1
enables definition of biographic profiles and relations among persons and groups,
and the Organization ontology2
allows expression of organizational structures, including
governmental institutions. It would be a good strategy to use vocabularies and ontologies
well known by the Web community, rather than to develop new ontologies.
Bibliographic ontologies enable description of entities that belong to the bibliographic
set, such as textual publications (e.g., articles, books, and series) and web pages, datasets,
films etc., and define the relationships among these bibliographic entities. Apart from
autographed manuscripts and single-edition works, in most cases bibliographic entities
in library collections present a complex set of relationships. For instance, “derivative
relationships” concern different editions of the same work, translations in different
languages, or works derived from a pre-existing work, and “sequential relationships”
include sequels of a monograph (Tillet, 1989; Green, 2001). A work may be a part of,
the logical continuation of, or the transformation of another work (IFLA 2017, 69-78).
1
http://www.foaf-project.org/
2
http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/ W3C Recommendation 16 January 2014.

2. 2
Bibliographic ontologies should define specific relationships, such as authorship,
editorship, and aboutness among the entities, as well as the relationships that connect
works and their abridgments, adaptations, and translations. Besides, bibliographic
ontologies can underline relationships between a serial and the transformations it may
have had over time, such as supplements or successors.
Bibliographic data model such as Bibframe3
FRBRoo4
and Dublin Core Metadata
Element Set,5
are well known and well founded on bibliographic expertise. Besides, there
are other bibliographic ontologies available on the Web, made by computer scientists
alone or scholars unrelated to the knowledge organization (KO) field. These require
careful consideration from the scholars who are concerned with bibliographic entities
and relationships. Among the challenges and opportunities for KO in the digital age is
the control over the increase of bibliographic ontologies. Scholars in KO should take
interest in bibliographic ontologies, monitor and scientifically supervise the development
of new ontologies, considering the internationally accepted conceptual models developed
in the field of KO.
Objectives
This paper is meant to analyse and evaluate two bibliographic ontologies developed
without the contribution of KO scholars. In particular, the paper analyses Bibo (The
Bibliographic Ontology)6
and FaBiO (FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology).7
The aim
of the study is to analyse the classes and the properties defined in these two ontologies,
evaluate the use of the categories in Bibo, and verify the alignment with FRBR in FaBiO.
Finally, it checks the consistency of the definitions of the classes with the categories that
belong to the catalographic field. Moreover, the study endeavours to evaluate the
properties provided by Bibo and FaBiO, checking them against the properties offered by
Bibframe 2.0.
Bibo and FaBiO
Bibo was developed in 2009 by Bruce D'Arcus and Frédérick Giasson, and it is the
first OWL ontology written in RDF that provides main concepts and properties for
describing bibliographic entities and citations. The BNB Linked Data Platform, which
provides access to the British National Bibliography published as linked open data, uses
the Bibo properties from 2011, along with the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set.8
The
3
https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/
4
https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11240. See a comparative analysis of BIBFRAME 1 and FRBRoo in
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller et al. (2015).
5
http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
6
The Bibliographic Ontology: http://bibliontology.com/
7
The FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology: http://purl.org/spar/fabio
8
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/pdfs/publishing_bnb_as_lod.pdf

3. 3
Linked Data Service of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek also uses Bibo and Dublin Core
terms from 2010.9
The developers of FaBiO, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton, assert that it is an ontology
based on the FRBR (IFLA 1998, 2009) entities and that it was created for describing
entities from different and correlated points of view on the Semantic Web. The FaBiO
Work class is restricted to entities published or printable: textual publications, such as
articles, books, series, and journals, etc. The entities also include web pages, datasets,
computer algorithms, catalogues, etc. FaBiO is part of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and
Referencing Ontologies),10
a set of complementary and orthogonal ontologies developed
in OWL 2 DL11
by Bologna University and Oxford University (2009). SPAR participates
in the Semantic Publishing project, which deals with the use of Semantic Web
technologies with the aim of semantically linking scientific literature to facilitate its
discovery. SPAR ontologies “describe the different aspects of the scholarly publishing
domain”.12
At present, FaBio includes 7 super-classes, 1 equivalent class, and 237 subclasses (for
a total of 245 Classes), 28 object properties13
, 65 datatype properties14
and 15 named
individuals. Bibo, in comparison, includes 5 principal classes and 34 subclasses, 32
object properties and 20 sub-properties, 20 datatype properties (10 of which are OWL
equivalent properties) and 26 sub-properties.
Methods
Recently, Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller et al. (2016) analysed five bibliographic models,
Bibframe, Mods, Mads, Schema.org e FRBRoo, with the aim of finding the differences
and similarities in these models. The mapping they provided highlights five types of
alignment of the use of classes and properties.
In the present study, a comparative methodology has instead been proposed with the
aim of making an analysis and a reliable assessment of the classes and properties of Bibo
and FaBiO. The definitions of the classes in Bibo and FaBiO are compared with the
bibliographic categories used in the catalographic field that provides the framework
9
http://www.dnb.de/EN/Service/DigitaleDienste/LinkedData/linkeddata_node.html
10
http://purl.org/spar
11
OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. Document Overview (Second Edition). W3C Recommendation 11
December 2012, http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/
12
The SPAR ontologies are twelve in all: FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO); Citation Typing
Ontology (CiTO); Bibliographic Reference Ontology (BiRO); Citation Counting and Context Characterisation
Ontology (C4O); Document Components Ontology (DoCO); Publishing Status Ontology (PSO); Publishing
Roles Ontology (PRO); Publishing Workflow Ontology (PWO); Scholarly Contributions and Roles Ontology
(SCoRO); DataCite Ontology (DataCite); Bibliometric Data Ontology (BiDO);Five Stars of Online Research
Articles Ontology (Five).
13
They are organized into the following groups: Top Object Property, Has embodiment, Has exemplar, Has
subject term, Related endeavor, Has part, Has realization, Is embodiment of, Is exemplar of, Is part of, Is
realization of, Is representation of, Is scheme of.
14
They are organized into the following super-properties: Top data properties, Has title, Has identifier, Has
date.

4. 4
within which the entities should be evaluated. In particular, the FaBiO classes are related
to the FRBR model and to the recently published IFLA - LRM (Library Reference
Model), which is the synthesis of the FR family of conceptual models previously and
separately published, such as the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD)
and the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD). LRM provides
principles for bibliographic information and can be used in LOD building for improving
the use of bibliographical data in the LOD environment.
Moreover, an examination of the properties exposed in FaBiO and Bibo has been
carried out comparing them with the vocabulary of Bibframe 2.015
provided by The
Library of Congress. In particular, the Cataloging Resource Relationships (general,
specific and detailed),16
mainly sub-properties of the property relatedTo, are taken into
consideration.
Analysis and Discussion
Bibo presents a variety of entities related to the bibliographic world, organized into
five principal classes: Agent, Collection, Document, Document status, Event, and 34
subclasses. Bibo asserts that the classes Agent and Document (and the subclass Image)
are equivalent to FOAF corresponding classes. The classes Document and Collection
accommodate the majority of the bibliographic sub-entities. Among the subclasses of
Document, we find Article, Book, Image, Legal Document, Manuscript, Report, Web
page, etc. Among the subclasses of Collection are Periodical, Series, and Web site.
FaBiO has been developed for describing and publishing any bibliographic entity on
the Semantic Web, prioritizing textual entities, such as books, articles, and journals. It
provides classes relevant for academia.
The FaBiO classes have been structured using the FRBR categories: Work,
Expression, Manifestation, and Item. The objective is to describe a document considering
its different Expressions. For instance, an academic paper could be firstly published as a
journal article, later as a paper in conference proceedings, or as a book chapter (Peroni
and Shotton, 2012, 36). The developers intentionally aligned FaBiO with the FRBR
categories to permit greater expressivity (Shotton, 2011). In fact, FaBiO enables the
definition of the various formats of an academic article. FaBiO allows creation of
machine-readable RDF metadata and easily imports terms from DC, FRBR, FRBR
Core17
, SKOS18
and PRISM.19
Entities such as “contributor” and “creator” in FaBiO are
considered as annotation properties, which are mainly imported from DC or RDFS.
15
https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/
16
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-category.html
17
http://vocab.org/frbr/core
18
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
19
http://www.prismstandard.org/specifications/

5. 5
In the present survey, I have been focusing on the evaluation of the use of FRBR
categories in FaBiO to distinguish different aspects of the publication process. The
FaBiO classes have been compared with the FRBR categories (Work, Expression,
Manifestation, and Item) also considering the IFLA-LRM high-level conceptual model.
As a result, the mapping between relevant classes in FaBiO on one hand, and the
categories and the definitions provided by FRBR and IFLA-LRM on the other,
emphasizes that the alignment is restricted to a simplistic level and it is not always
correct. Table 1 shows a sample of categories used in FaBiO (column 1), definitions in
FRBR (column 2), and categories used in IFLA-LRM (column 3).
Table 1. Mapping among classes in FaBiO and bibliographic categories in FRBR and in IFLA-
LRM.
Classes 1.FaBiO ontology 2. FRBR (2009) 3. IFLA–LRM (2017)
Abstract Expression
“Abstracts, digests and summaries
[…] represent new works” (p. 18)
“Autonomous Work” (p. 63)
Work (p. 21)
Article Expression Component/part of a W. (p. 67-68) Work (p. 39)
Book Expression Format of Manifestation (p. 21) -
Critical
edition
Work -
Expression(with critical
notes) (p.23)
Film Movie (Expres.) - Work (p. 21)
Index Expression Referential Work (p. 63-64) -
Supplement Expression
Referential Work/Express.;
Autonom. W/E (p. 63-73)
Work/Expression (p. 70)
It is necessary to notice that in FaBiO the distinction between Work and Expression
is not clear enough. FRBR and the recent IFLA-LRM have defined the levels of the
bibliographic description and have established a strict connection among Work,
Expression, Manifestation and Item: “The Work consists of the intellectual or artistic
creation that lies behind all the various Expressions of the Work” (IFLA-LRM, 20). A
Manifestation is a Manifestation of an Expression of a Work. FaBiO, instead, uses the
FRBR categories with the aim of defining the different types of bibliographical entities
or objects that belong to the publishing world. The relationships among Manifestations,
Expressions and Work are lost. In the hierarchical organization of classes and subclasses,
we can find among the subclasses of Work: not only artistic work, critical edition, essay,
image, reference work, report, research paper, review, and vocabulary; but also dataset,
metadata, and grant application. Among the subclasses of Expression are abstract, article,
book, brief report, chapter, comment, conference poster, index, letter, manuscript,
metadata document, movie, periodical issue, proceedings paper, report document,
repository, and supplement, as well as web content, computer program, database, and e-
mail.
It is not clear the rationale for classifying as Work, for example, essay, report, research
paper, review, and as Expression, abstract, article, manuscript, brief report, chapter, or

6. 6
proceedings paper. In many cases, the entities classified as Expression should have been
classified as Work. In my opinion, the developers of FaBiO confuse the FRBR
bibliographic categories (Work and Expression) with the types of publications, such as
books, articles, or issues. It is also to be noted that the alignment with FRBR categories
in the hierarchical organization of the FaBiO subclasses is much more complex. For
instance, Review is classified as Work; Book Review is a subclass of Review (Work);
Review Article is a subclass of Article (Expression).
The properties provided by Bibo and FaBiO are now analysed and compared with the
Bibframe 2.0 properties. Bibframe 2.0 presents “three core levels of abstraction: Work,
Instance, and Item” and “additional key concepts that have relationships to the core
Classes”,20
such as Agents, Subjects, and Events (associated with Works or Instances).
The Bibframe vocabulary21
offers 75 classes and 112 subclasses (plus 2 FOAF classes),
194 properties, out of which 131 object properties (and sub-prop.), and 63 datatype
properties (and sub-prop.). FaBiO presents a small number of object properties (28);
Bibo, on the other hand, presents a greater number of these (52), versus the 194 properties
in total provided by Bibframe 2.0.
Table 2 offers a mapping between all the object properties presented in FaBiO, part
of the object properties offered in Bibo, and the properties of Bibframe 2.0 pertaining to
the bibliographic field. Table 2 presents only 18 out of the 52 Bibo object properties, as
the main part of these is generic or not devoted to bibliographic relations strictly speaking
(event, agent of event, place of event, etc.). FaBiO offers mainly object properties
followed from the alignment with FRBR that match little with the Bibframe properties,
due to the decrease in core classes, as Bibframe provides only Work, Instance, and Item.
Besides, FaBiO adds three properties, and their inverse properties: hasManifestation,
hasPortrayal, hasRepresentation.
Moreover, the mapping offered in Table 2 highlights that FaBiO and Bibo lack
properties that concern derivative, merging, and absorbed resources, which are provided
instead by Bibframe. Bibframe offers sub-properties of the property relatedTo, such as
accompaniedBy, to define a supplement or index added to a resource, and derivativeOf,
to express translations and different editions of a work. Additionally, it provides the
property precededBy to describe the replacement of a resource with another, the merging
of two or more resources to form a new resource, the continuation of a resource under a
new title, and the incorporation of a resource into another, and suceededBy to define a
resource that supersedes another and the division of a resource in two different resources.
These properties are really relevant to connect entities that belong to the bibliographic
field; nevertheless, they are not present in Bibo and FaBiO.
20
https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/bibframe2-model.html
21
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-category.html

7. 7
Table 2. Mapping among object properties in FaBiO, Bibo, and Bibframe 2.0.
1. FaBiO object properties 2.Bibo object properties 3. Bibframe 2.0 object properties
Relation (reviewOf) review
cites/citedBy references
isReferencedBy referencedBy
distributor acquisitionSource
owner
reproducedIn reproductionOf
has creator, has responsible contributor (author, edit.) agent
has discipline
has embodiment /is embod. of
has exemplar / is exemplar of hasItem / ItemOf
has format format
has language language
has license
has manifestation/ is manif. of hasInstance / instanceOf
has part hasPart hasPart (seriesOf, subseriesOf) / PartOf
has portrayal/ is portrayal of
has publisher publisher (issuer)
has realization/ is realiz. of isVersionOf (transl.Of) instanceOf / hasInstance
has representation/ is repr. of
has rights rights
has subject term subject subject
is discipline of
is in scheme
is part of isPartOf (reproducedIn) part of (hasSeries, hasSubseries)
is scheme of
is stored on
stores
accompanies (issuedWith, supplementTo)
accompaniedBy (supplement, index)
derivativeOf (translationOf,
OriginalVersion)/hasDerivative
precededBy (separatedFrom, replacementOf,
mergerOf, continues..)
succeededBy (splitInto, replacedBy,
mergedToForm, absorbedBy, ..)
dataSource
has title* title
* In Bibo it is an annotation property.
It is also important to bear in mind that, even though Bibframe 2.0 gives special
attention to derivative and added and merged resources, it should also have paid full
attention to the properties that belong to continuing resources, such as serials. The formal
ontology PRESSoo (2016), a recently developed extension of FRBRoo22
, addresses the
22
IFLA. Definition of FRBRoo. A conceptual model for bibliographic information in object-oriented
formalism. Version 2.4. Prepared by Working Group on FRBR/CRM Dialogue. Edited by Chryssoula Bekiari,

8. 8
problems of absorption, continuation, replacement, separation, and merging, also
provided by Bibframe 2.0. Moreover, PRESSoo adds, among others, the cases of
temporary replacement of a serial with another serial, the reprint of a dead serial as a
monograph, the enhancing of a series by a monograph, the launch and the end of a
periodical, the issuing rules (for instance, regularity, frequency, etc.), and the partial
continuation of a serial.
Besides, it is worth mentioning that in Bibframe 2.0 the property
DerivativeOf/hasDerivative should have been better defined. This property should
include, for instance, the following cases: a Work that derives from another Work; a
Work that is a continuation of another Work, abridgements and adaptations (see FRBR),
and an Expression that derives from another Expression of a Work.
Conclusions
This survey highlights the problems that arise in developing a formal ontology in the
bibliographic field, available for the Web community, and in modelling classes,
subclasses and properties. The study emphasizes that the two bibliographic ontologies
analysed, FaBiO and Bibo, are inadequate from many points of view. Even though the
developers of the Bibo curated in particular the soundness of the definitions of the classes
that belong to the bibliographic field, this ontology is poor with respect to the properties
required in a bibliographic scenario. The FaBiO ontology provides a simplistic alignment
to the FRBR categories, not grounded in sound catalographic bases, and therefore
inadequate to reinforce the ontology. In addition, both the ontologies show insufficient
attention to the bibliographic relationships concerning derivative or merged resources.
The evaluation of the two bibliographic ontologies highlights the need to take as point
of reference in the process of the realization of interlinking different datasets, the
bibliographic data models provided with the contribution of researchers in the
catalographic field. It stresses the required attention of KO scholars to the modelling of
bibliographic ontologies and the control over the growth of bibliographic ontologies
made by computer scientists alone.
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