Recently there's been a renewed vigor in an effort to develop a new bibliography ontology for semantic web applications. Bruce d'Arcus, Frédérick Giasson, Mike Bergman and others are working to create an ontology with these goals:

1. Should be a superset of legacy formats like BibTeX, RIS, and so forth
2. Must support the most demanding needs in the social sciences, humanities, and law, and those who deal with non-Western languages
3. The class system must be able to map to the type system in the citation style language I [Bruce] designed. In short, it is not enough to just encode the data: it needs to be able to be formatted according to the often archaic details of citation styles
4. Should be developer-friendly; I consider examples like DOAP and SKOS to be models here
5. Behind all of these goals are a more concrete goal: it should be perfect for using in OpenDocument/OpenOffice citation support and should handle Zotero’s needs.

No small task, but that group is more than up to it. They've kindly indulged the questions, ideas, suggestions, and musings (and 'duh' statements) of a novice like me over the past week or so, and I'm very much indebted to them for that. Thanks to you all.

In those goals, I see enormously powerful and exciting end-uses. In order of increasing excitement for me:

#1 above

It will play well with older applications while boosting up the strengths of them.

#4 above

Tools to make use of it won't languish in complexity of development, meaning that we'll be able to get some applications into practice and, more importantly, build upon the best of those applications to reach more sophistication and power more quickly (That's something that's held back semantic web for far too long, I think)

#'s 2 and 3 above

Ah-ha...now we're really cookin'. By getting at those most demanding needs, applications will have something more to offer for researchers in the most esoteric of fields (especially in the humanities). That, I hope, will encourage adoption by the stars in academic disciplines -- those who have direct access to things like rare manuscripts, lead archaeological digs, examine priceless artwork directly, etc. And, okay, so sometimes, maybe even often, the powerhouses in the upper echelons of academia haven't/don't/won't embrace Web 2.0 or structured web technologies. But if it makes their lives easier in making printed copies using the archaic styles of bibliography, fantastic--in the background all that beautiful structured data comes into being and has a fighting chance of finding its way into the shareable and interlinkable electronic data spaces. (And, having those stars using the technology will surely encourage more people in academia to adopt them!)

#5 above

Picking up on the previous point, this will facilitate technologies oriented toward both print and the web as database. (See "My Personal Library and the Semantic Web", also from Frédérick Giasson, for how Zotero helps us push our own, personal print worlds into the web as database.) BibTex makes bibliography sharing, at least, possible, but who in the humanities has heard of BibTex?. I've long lamented that more humanities folks aren't embracing new technologies for writing, and more abstractly for representing ideas and the relationships between them. Here, we'd have something that does that, and represents the relationships between printed texts -- and everything else that can serve as evidence -- too.

Why would this make me want to be a grad student again? One part of it is the utter disorientation to the "who's who" in a discipline that beginning grad students (as well as undergrads!) experience. Indeed, much of the initial work for my dissertation was simply figuring out who does what kind of work in what kinds of areas (e.g., "Martin Irvine is an oft-cited scholar in the history of textuality, who gains authority in the field from having worked with X, Y, and Z manuscripts in æ, β, and c, languages"). Another essential step was to study bibliographies. My dissertation director, A. N. Doane, often said that the first thing he looked at in a book was the bibliography. Looking through enough of them, one starts to see the patterns in citations. When the day comes that all this bibliographic info going into printed text also finds its way into the web of data, then many of those hours spent just getting acquainted with the socio-academic patterns of scholarship will disappear into a handful of SPARQL queries--or just be handily browsed and filtered through whatever tools are available then.

Last point--before anyone (such as, perhaps, A. N. Doane) looks at the above and says that I'd be losing an invaluable research skill and a fundamental part of what it means to be a Ph.D., I'd say that I'd no more be losing a research skill than I would be in learning to use an online database instead of the card catalog. Moreover, once upon a time there was an expectation that Ph.D.s keep up on all the research in their fields. There are few today who would say that that is anything close to feasible. But, if and when all this bibliographic information becomes open and interlinked, it might be feasible again. No, no one would be able to read all the scholarship, but the browsing and querying around scholars and publications would make it possible to at least keep up with who's doing what. Heck, for that matter I imagine handy applications that will regularly query SPARQL endpoints of bibliographic data and automatically analyze them for broader patterns of citations -- and hence scholarly directions -- than any person or group of people could do today.

Update

See also this discussion of Zotero from a PhD candidate in history. He's focussed on Zotero, but much of the discussion comes down to what the Bibliography Ontology is working toward.

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