Dear Colleagues,

Silvio and I have been working hard to complete the first release of *DoCO, the Document Components Ontology*, a new member of SPAR, the Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (http://bit.ly/9d8qAi), in time for Monday's teleconference. I apologise that we did not achieve this sooner, to give you more time to study it.

We have based our choice of DoCO classes on the following sources:

   * Anita's excellent work analysing the varying document structures
     used in journal articles from a variety of STM publishers;
   * Tudor and Sigi's SALT Rhetorical Ontology, SRO
     (http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/ontologies/sro);
   * terms in the National Library of Medicine DTD, widely used by STM
     publishers and by Pubmed Central for XML markup of documents; and
   * our own common sense and experience as authors and readers of
     research articles and books.

DoCO v1.0, which is now available at http://purl.org/spar/doco/, attempts to provide a comprehensive description of the main structural and rhetorical components used in scholarly documents, employing as class names terms that are familiar to scholars. It used rhetorical terms from the SALT Rhetorical Ontology, to which it adds its own rhetorical and structural terms, and imports Silvio's Pattern Ontology (http://www.essepuntato.it/2008/12/pattern) to define formal structural patterns for segmenting a document into its component parts.

Opening DoCO in a web browser will display a human-readable version of the ontology, while opening it in an ontology editor such as Protege will display the tree structure of the OWL 2 DL ontology itself.

Additionally, to aid your understanding, we have published an architectural diagram of DoCO at http://bit.ly/b383VR, and a set of explanatory figures, showing how DoCO terms relate to different parts of a recent article from the Journal of Cell Biology, as a PDF document available at http://bit.ly/d0VhJr.

We look forward to discussing this with you on Monday.

Kind regards,

David

--

Dr David Shotton david.shot...@zoo.ox.ac.uk <mailto:mailto:david.shot...@zoo.ox.ac.uk>
Reader in Image Bioinformatics

Image Bioinformatics Research Group http://ibrg.zoo.ox.ac.uk
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford tel: +44-(0)1865-271193 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK fax: +44-(0)1865-310447

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