He was born in Belfast into a devote Presbyterian family and grew up during the Second World War. From Belfast he moved to Dublin to train as a Vet at Trinity.

Moving to a catholic country presented dad with new opportunities – for starters – he was able to supplement his student income by smuggling condoms across the border and selling them to his fellow students.

Although we might all admire this entrepreneurial spirit I should point out that this additional income wasn’t always put to good use.

For when he and his friend, Billy MacArthur, found a bat’s roost they scooped up a bagful of unfortunate bats and headed off to the local cinema, who happened to be showing a zombie movie. I like to think that when he and Billy released the bats they invented the first 3D cinema experience.

After Trinity he left Ireland for Cornwall, where he met mum. The two of them then moved to Bedford where he setup his own practice and started a family.

After 40 years they returned to Cornwall.

Retirement can be a risky business – but my parents where lucky. They found friends who made them laugh, who also enjoyed a bottle of red wine or few, who made their retirement a full and happy time.

But on the 24th of January, my daddy died of cancer.

My father, as anyone who met him will know, was a cantankerous, stubborn bugger. He would argue with anyone about any subject. I sometimes wondered why.

I’m sure he did it because he loved the challenge, loved the debate, loved challenging why people thought what they thought, and because he was endlessly curious about the world.

Born into a world that was soon to disappear, washed away by the flood of the modern world. It would have been easy for him to have retreated into what he knew.

But his determination and curiosity drove him forward. Stopped him from retreating into the past.

Instead he did what he loved and explored the world – he caught animals in East Africa, worked and travelled in Asia, read anything and everything, built his practice and then in recent years started to explore the world via the Web.

But more than his willingness to embrace the new was his desire to challenge the status quo and the beliefs that others held.

He knew that whoever you are you’re just a mammal. That it was ok to question what you and others believed and did. He taught me that not only was it ok to question but also not to be scared of the consequences. He taught me to question others and do what I thought was right. He taught me quiet determination.

This Christmas, my brother, Sean and I ended up discussing life and death over a bottle of whisky. And at some point Sean asked me what I wanted out of life.

I told him I wanted to die happy having made interesting things I could be proud of. I think Dad managed that.

What I learned from my daddy’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

In the final days of his life he was very tired but when he woke he woke with a smile. He was happy even though he knew he was dying. He was happy because he was happy with his life, he loved being a vet, he loved living in Cornwall, he was proud of us: his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and, he was proud of what he made of his life but most of all he loved his wife, my mummy.

Don’t mourn his death; he wouldn’t want that.

Remember him for the last time he teased you, the last time you fell for one of his practical jokes, the last time you winced at one of his emails or perhaps just the last time he made you look at the world in a different way.

Scientific publishing has in many ways remained largely unchanged since 1665. Scientific discoveries are still published in journal articles where the article is a review, a piece of metadata if you will, of the scientists’ research.

Cover of the first issue of Nature, 4 November 1869.

This is of course not all bad. For example, I think it is fair to say that this approach has played a part in creating the modern world. The scientific project has helped us understand the universe, helped eradicate diseases, helped decreased child mortality and helped free us from the drudgery of mere survival. The process of publishing peer reviewed articles is the primary means of disseminating this human knowledge and as such has been, and remains, central to the scientific project.

And if I am being honest nor is it entirely fair, to claim that things haven’t changed in all those years – clearly they have. Recently new technologies, notably the Web, have made it easier to publish and disseminate those articles, which in turn has lead to changes in the associated business models of publishers e.g. Open Access publications.

However, it seems to me that scientific publishers and the scientific community at large has yet to fully utilize the strengths of the Web.

Content is distributed over http but what is distributed is still, in essence, a print journal over the Web. Little has changed since 1665 – the primary objects, the things a SMT publisher publishes remain the article, issue and journal.

The power of the Web is its ability to share information via URIs and more specifically its ability to globally distribute a wide range of documents and media types (from text to video to raw data and software (as source code or as binaries)). The second and possibly more powerful aspect of the Web is its ability to allow people to recombine information, to make assertions and statements about things in the world and information on the Web. These assertions can create new knowledge and aid discoverability of information.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be research articles and journals – both provide value – for example journals provides a useful point of aggregation and quality assurance to the author and reader. The article is an immutable summary of the researchers work at a given date and, of course, the paper remains the primary means of communication between scientists. However, the Web provides mechanisms to greatly enhance the article, to make it more discoverable and allow it to place it into a wider context.

In addition to the published article STM publishers already publish supporting information in the form of ‘supplementary information’ unfortunately this is often little more than a PDF document. However, it is also not clear (to me at least) if the article is the right location for some of this material – it appears to me that a more useful approach is that of the ‘Research Object’ [pdf], semantically rich aggregations of resources, as proposed by the Force11 community.

It seems to me that the notion of a Research Object as the primary published object is a powerful one. One that might make research more useful.

What is a Research Object?

Well what I mean by a Research Object is a URI (and if one must a DOI) that identifies a distinct piece of scientific work. An Open Access ‘container’ that would allow an author to group together all the aspects of their research into a single location. These resources within it might include:

• The published article or articles if a piece of research resulted in a number of articles (whether they be OA or not);
• The raw data behind the paper(s) or individual figures within the paper(s) (published in a non-proprietary format e.g. csv not Excel);
• The protocols used (so an experiment can be easily replicated);
• Supporting or supplementary video;
• URLs to News and Views or other commentary from the Publisher or elsewhere;
• URLs to news stories;
• URLs to university reading lists;
• URLs to profile pages of the authors and researchers involved in the work;
• URLs to the organizations involved in the work (e.g. funding bodies, host university or research lab etc.);
• Links to other research (both historical i.e. bibliographic information but also research that has occurred since publication).

Furthermore, the relationship between the different entities within a Research Object should be explicit. It is not enough to treat a Research Object as a bag of stuff, there should be stated and explicit relationship between the resources held within a Research Object. For example, the relationship between the research and the funding organization should be defined via a vocabulary (e.g. funded_by), likewise any raw data should be identified as such and where appropriate linked to the relevant figures within a paper.

Something like this:

The major components of a Research Object.

It is important to note that while the Research Object is open access the resources it contains may or may not be. For example, the raw data might be open whereas the article might not. People would therefore be able to reference the Research Object, point to it on the Web, discuss it and make assertions about it.

In the FRBR world a Research Object would be a Work i.e. a “distinct intellectual creation”.

Making research more discoverable

The current publishing paradigm places seriously limitations on the discoverability of research articles (or research objects).

Scientists work with others to research a domain of knowledge; in some respects therefore research articles are metadata about the universe (or at least the experiment). They are assertions, made by a group of people, about a particular thing based on their research and the data gathered. It would therefore be helpful if scientists could discover prior research along these lines of enquiry.

Implicit in the above description of a Research Object is the need to publish URIs about: people, organisations (universities, research labs, funding bodies etc.) and areas of research.

These URIs and the links between them would provide a rich network of science – a graph that describes and maps out the interrelationships between people, organisations and their area of interest, each annotated with research objects, such a graph would also allow for pages such as:

• All published research by an author;
• All published research by a research lab;
• The researchers that have worked together in a lab;
• The researchers who have collaborated on a published paper;
• The areas of research by lab, funding body or individual;
• Etc.

Such a graph would help readers to both ‘follow their nose’ to discover research and provide meaningful landing pages for search.

Digital curation

One of the significant benefits a journal brings to its readership is the role of curation. The editors of the journal selects and publishes the best research for their readers. On the Web there is no reason this role couldn’t be extended beyond the editor to the users and readers of a site.

Different readers will have different motivations for doing so but providing a mechanism for those users to aggregate and annotate research objects provides a new and potentially powerful mechanism by which scientific discoveries could be surfaced.

For example, a lecturer might curate a collection of papers for an undergraduate class on genomics, combining research objects with their own comments, video and links to other content across the web. This collection could then be shared and used more widely with other lecturers. Alternatively a research lab might curate a collection of papers relevant to their area of research but choose to keep it private.

Providing a rich web of semantically linked resources in this way would allow for the development of a number of different metrics (in addition to Impact Factor). These metrics would not need to be limited to scientific impact; they could be extended to cover:

• Educational indices – a measure of the citations in university reading lists;
• Social impact – a measure of citations in the mainstream media;
• Scientific impact of individual papers;
• Impact of individual scientists or research labs;
• Etc.

Such metrics could be used directly e.g. research indexes or; indirectly e.g. to help readers find the best/ most relevant content.

Finally it is worth remembering that in all cases this information should be available for both humans and machines to consume and process. In other words this information should be available in structured, machine readable formats.

Banksy by rocor, some rights reserved.

Anyway when we started work on on the BBC’s Nature site we set out our development manifesto. I thought you might be interested in it:

1. Peristence — only mint a new URIs if one doesn’t already exist: once minted, never delete it
2. Linked open data — data and documents describe the real world; things in the real world are identified via HTTP URIs; links describe how those things are related to each other.
3. The website is the API
4. RESTful — the Web is stateless, work with this architecture, not against it.
5. One Web – one canonical URI for each resource (thing), dereferenced to the appropriate representation (HTML, JSON, RDF, etc.).
6. Fix the data don’t hack the code
7. Books have pages, the web has links
8. Do it right or don’t do it at all — don’t hack in quick fixes or ‘tactical solutions’ they are bad for users and bad for the code.
9. Release early, release often — small, incremental changes are easy to test and proof.

It’s worth noting that we didn’t always live up to these standards — but at least when we broke our rules we did so knowingly and had a chance of fixing them at a later date.

There’s a bit of a health warning however, these are just ideas. I’ve no real idea if they are that practical and they almost certainly don’t fit into the current strategy.

Don

My ideas…

Lab UK meets so you want to be a scientist

Lab UK is the part of the BBC’s website where you can participate in scientific experiments. They’ve done some cool stuff – including Brain Test Britain which had 67,000 people sign up and resulted in a paper in Nature [pdf].

The various experiments are tied into TV programmes and this is really important because it helps generate interest and get the number of participants required to make the experiment work. However, it also means that the experiments are designed in advance, by the scientists, and the public’s role is one of test subject.

The experiments do help build knowledge but they probably don’t help people understand science.

So here’s the idea – a bit like Radio 4′s “So You Want To Be A Scientist” the process would start with people suggesting ideas, questions they would like answering, the site would need to provide sufficient support to help people refine their ideas. It might even use material from the BBC archive to help explain some of the basics but at it’s heart it would be a collaborative process.

The ideas would then be voted on and the most popular would then be taken forward. With the help of scientists the experiment would be designed and build and carried out on the Lab UK platform, giving these amateur experiments potential access to a huge audience.

The process would be a rolling series of experiments designed and carried out by the public.

History through the eyes of the BBC

The BBC makes a lot of programmes about history – but much more significantly it has been part of or at least recorded a lot of our more recent history.

So rather than making a history site about the Romans, the Victorians or whatever I would use the BBC archive to tell the history of the world as seen through the eyes of the BBC.

Combining news stories, clips from programmes (broadcast or not), music and photographs the site would tell the story of the world since 18 October 1922.

The site would chart the major political, scientific, sporting, cultural and technological events since 1922 but also the minor events – the ones that remind us of our own past.

The site would provide a page for every day, month, year and decade since the BBC came into existence as well as pages for the people, organisations and events the BBC has featured in that time.

Basically a URI for everything the BBC has recorded in the last 90 odd years.

The site would also allow members of the public to add their thoughts and memories (shared under whatever licensing terms they wish) to enrich it further to create a digital public space for the UK.

This is a very, very good idea – it should allow for better content discovery, new ways to aggregate news stories about people, places or subjects and generally allow computers to help people process some of the structured information behind a story.

Newspaper by Luc De Leeuw

rNews is still in draft. At the time of writing the published spec is at version 0.1, there are clearly ambitions to built out on this work and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Although I’m sure much of this has been thought about before I thought I would jot down my initial thoughts on this early draft.

More URIs please

The current spec makes extensive use of xsd:string and xsd:double to assign attributes to a class. For example, the Location Class includes attributes for longitude, latitude and altitude but no URIs for places.

Using URIs to name places (and people, subjects, organisations etc.) would allow for much more interesting things to be done with the data.

It would make it easier to aggregate content from more than one news outlet and generally link things together by location, person and area of interest.

There’s obviously an issue here – there needs to be a good source of URI for places – but in reality there are lots of candidates out there from dbpedia to geonames.

Greater reuse of existing vocabularies

There are existing vocabularies that describe the some of the classes described in rNew – notably FOAF and Dublin Core.

I would prefer rNews reusing those vocabularies or at least linking (owl:sameAS) to them.

I’m not a fan of tags

I don’t really like “tagging” it lack semantics and is extremely ambiguous.

If I tag a news story am I claiming it’s primarily about that thing, features that thing, also about that thing, what? And whatever you think it means I guarantee I can find someone else who disagrees!

I would rather see more defined predicates such as primarilyAbout etc. I recognise this would add a bit of complexity but it would also increase the utility of the vocabulary.

If the intention is to aid discoverability through categorisation then use SKOS.

Explicit predicates for source materials

I think it’s really important to explicitly link to source material, especially for science and medicine (it’s why Nature News and has always done so).

A simple set of predicates for the DOI, abstract URI, scientist/researcher of the original research and/or a URI for the raw data should suffice.

Again, it would also help if there was a handy source of URIs for scientists.

Should the story be at the heart of the ontology?

I’ve always thought of news stories as metadata about real world events.

If you reframe the problem in this way then what you really want are predicates to describe the relationship of the story (article, photo, video) to the event. You also then want links between people & places and those events (which could be inferred through the various news stories).

Building the ontology this way round would allow for some very powerful analysis and discovery of stories.

Anyway – I’ll be really interested to see how the ontology develops and how widely it gets adopted.

From a certain perspective this doesn’t represent a big change – after all we’re still publishing exclusive natural history news stories, video collections and video clips and information about: animals, plants, habitats (and the ancient earth’s habitats, such as Snowball Earth), adaptations & behaviours, places and ecozones, the geological time periods when they lived, the major mass extinction events, including the one that killed the dinosaurs, in fact lots of information on the history of life on earth and the fossil record. We even have a page about fish – and they don’t really exist!

However, from another perspective this is a really big change. It’s a big change because we’ve (hopefully) made everything so much simpler.

We’ve made it simpler by bringing everything together into one site and removed the various sub brands – if you love nature and natural history everything is now in one place: news stories, video clips from the archive, opinion pieces and more.

Bringing everything together has also allowed us to make a few additional changes which should help us more easily publish the content.

In addition to natural history news we have a features section where we can bring together articles and photo galleries (like this one) and a new blog Wonder Monkey written by Matt Walker. Matt has written a few posts so far including this one on the oddball midge that shouldn’t exist.

I really hope you like it. It represents the culmination of two years of work, during which time we launched and evolved both the site itself and the editorial proposition – there now are c.3,000 clips available online (many of which are available worldwide) about almost 900 animals (both prehistoric and living), 50 plants etc.

And of course wildlife data is for machines too.

However, after two years of development this represents the last major release, for a while at least. The site will continue to grow because we are continuing to create great new content as well as digging out the best bits from the archive – like this video collection looking back at David Attenborough’s Madagascar (starting with Zoo Quest 50 years ago). But there won’t be any major new features for a while, not that that’s a major problem – the site should offer a rich experience with amazing content.

As I said yesterday, I’m very proud of what we’ve produced and if I can marshal my thoughts I’ll try and write a post or two about how we went about building the site and the lessons I learnt on the way, until then enjoy the site.

The BBC has been a great place to work – I’ve worked with some amazing people, helped deliver some of the best work of my career and had the opportunity to speak at conferences around the world, including (amazingly) at the Web’s 20th birthday celebrations in CERN.

Day Three Hundred Sixty Five by Dustin Diaz, some rights reserved

The BBC can certainly be a challenging place to work but I’m very grateful to Dan Hill and Matt Wood for offering me a job in the first place. I just hope I’ve not let them down because for every challenge, gripe and frustration there have also been opportunities to learn new things, work with brilliant people and help deliver great stuff that has, I think, had an positive impact on what the BBC does online.

So what have I been up to since I’ve been here?

The first project I worked on was /programmes a site that means that every programme the BBC broadcasts now has a web presence – one that both humans and machines can enjoy. The site is sometimes criticized as being a card catalogue of BBC programme metadata but its worth remembering that until the site launched the vast majority of programmes had no URI, had no webpage of any kind; /programmes changed that at a stroke. It was also the first truly dynamic web site on bbc.co.uk and whatever people might say about the aesthetics the site has the prettiest URIs of any site I know (something to thanks Michael Smethurst for).

The music site was my other project while in the FM&T bit of Audio & Music. Building on Musicbrainz the idea was to create a rich graph, linking music programmes with artist pages (available as HTML and RDF etc.) via ‘clickable tracklistings‘.

After a couple of years I left Audio & Music and joined ‘BBC Vision’ – the bit of the the BBC that does the telly – and took on a project known internally as ‘BBC Earth‘. And pretty much tried to replicate the music work but for natural history content.

I say I tried to replicate the music work that’s not really true, or rather its only true to a point. The core underlying concepts where the same, but the manifestation is quite different. For starters we sought to digitise and make available the TV archive but we also created original content – this broke down into exclusive natural history news stories, stories from TV and Radio production teams on location and, curated video collections.

I wanted the nature site to help people discover, explore and understand the natural world through the BBC’s content, I hope we’ve achieve that to some extent. Personally, and I know I’m biased, I think the site is brilliant and one of the best looking and useful semantic web sites around (we publish the data as RDF).

The credit for the site, however, should go to the team that actually made it. I was lucky, the core of the team has remained on the project throughout its development and I’m indebted to those, more talented than me, for making it what it is.

As I’ve said, I think the site is brilliant and I think the editorial, technical and design knowledge and skills of the team shine through, the site is theirs not mine.

There’s much I could write about this work – but I should really do it a bit more justice than the space available here and so I’ll save what I have to say for another post. Also there’s one last thing to push live on the site, to round off its development and it feels wrong to preempt that.

So what now? Well I’m joining Nature Publishing Group as Head of Platform for nature.com. As a failed scientist I’m very excited by the opportunities – Nature is the leading weekly, international scientific journal with a mission to:

Helping achieve that mission on the Web is a really exciting prospect and I hope the next five years prove as productive as the last. Wish me luck.

The big change to this version is the removal of much of the publication specific stuff since this is handled elsewhere otherwise otherwise it should look like a fairly obvious evolution from the previous versions.

Version 3 of the science domain model

And here’s a N3 serialisation of the model. There’s still lots to do, it needs checking against what happens when there are multiple ranges are given for a property, we need to write proper definitions, add namespaces, look for existing ontology reuse etc.

<!-- Science Ontology - First version! Still to do: Declare namespaces Define ontology (name, author etc) Finish definitions Look for existing ontologies for reuse etc. Publish! -->

<!-- Classes -->

so:Observation a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Observation";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Hypothesis a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Hypothesis";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Experiment a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Experiment";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Equipment a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Equipment";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Method a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Method";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Collaboration a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Collaboration";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:ExperimentalObservation a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Experimental Observation";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here";
	rdfs:subClassOf so:Observation .

so:Data a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Data";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Analysis a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Analysis";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Publication a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Publication";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Theory a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Theory";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Prediction a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Prediction";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here" .

so:Agent a owl:Class;
	rdfs:label "Agent";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here"
	rdfs:subClassOf foaf:Agent .

<!-- Properties -->

so:inspiredBy a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "inspiredBy";
	rdfs:comment "definition goes here - but what happens with multiple ranges? hypotheses can be inspired by Observations, Theories and Predictions...";
	rdfs:domain so:Hypothesis;
	rdfs:range so:Observation;
	rdfs:range so:Theory;
	rdfs:range so:Prediction .

so:makes a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "makes";
	rdfs:comment "definition goes here";
	rdfs:domain so:Theory;
	rdfs:range so:Prediction .

so:tests a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "tests";
	rdfs:comment "definition goes here";
	rdfs:domain so:Experiment;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

so:equipment a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "equipment";
	rdfs:comment "Relates a piece of equipment to an experiment it is used in.";
	rdfs:domain so:Experiment;
	rdfs:range so:Equipment .

so:method a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "method";
	rdfs:comment "Relates a method to an experiment it was used in.";
	rdfs:domain so:Experiment;
	rdfs:range so:Method .

so:experimentalObservation a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "experimental observation";
	rdfs:comment "Relates an observation made as a result of an experiment to the experiment it was made in.";
	rdfs:domain so:Experiment;
	rdfs:range so:ExperimentalObservation .

so:captures a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "captures";
	rdfs:comment "Relates data to an experimental observation it was captured in.";
	rdfs:domain so:ExperimentalObservation;
	rdfs:range so:Data .

so:analyses a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "analyses";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Data .

so:published a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "published";
	rdfs:comment "Relates an Analysis to a Publication it was published in.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Publication .

<!-- Analysis to Theory -->

so:establishes a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "establishes";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Theory .

so:validates a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "validates";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Theory .

so:modifies a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "modifies";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Theory .

so:contradicts a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "contradicts";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Theory .

<!-- Analysis to Hypothesis -->

so:supports a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "supports";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

so:modifies a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "modifies";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

so:disproves a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "disproves";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Analysis;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

<!-- Agent properties -->

so:proposes a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "proposes";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

so:collaborates a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "collaborates";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Collaboration .

so:funds a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "funds";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Experiment .

so:performs a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "performs";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Experiment .

so:observes a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "proposes";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Observation .

so:forms a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "forms";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Analysis .

so:creates a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "creates";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Publication .

so:creditedWith a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "credited with";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Theory .

so:participates a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "participates";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Agent;
	rdfs:range so:Agent .

so:collaboratesOn a owl:ObjectProperty;
	rdfs:label "proposes";
	rdfs:comment "Definition goes here.";
	rdfs:domain so:Collaboration;
	rdfs:range so:Experiment;
	rdfs:range so:Hypothesis .

Second attempt at a science ontology

A few things worth highlighting:

The previous version contained included “Observation” defined as “an observed phenomena in the natural world cf “data” an observation resulting from an experiment.” While I still think the concept is valid (people observe things in the natural world and wonder why its like that) the term caused confusion – it wasn’t clear that that sort of observation was different from experimental observations. So now have two concepts:

1. Noticings – which replaces the previous “Observations” i.e. is an observed phenomena in the natural world;
2. Observations – which are experimental observations.

We added in “equipment” and “method” to experiment – this allows us to have URIs for things like the LHC and the Hubble Space Telescope which is handy.

We’ve expanded out the agent role a bit to include “Collaborations” which hopefully allows for the modeling of research projects such as the LHC, the Human Genome Project and the like.

And finally we’ve fleshed out the paper, peer review stuff.

What do you think?

First attempt at a science ontology

To give  a bit of context – the idea behind the ontology is to provide a relatively high level model to describe the scientific method so that organisations, such as the BBC, could structure their content (archive footage, news stories etc.) using the model.

Hopefully most of the terms used are self explanatory, but for those that might not be:

Hypothesis – to quote from Princeton University – an hypothesis is a “a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena”. A non-scientist might call this a theory.

Theory – again to quote from Princeton University a theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena.”  A non-scientist might think of this as a ‘fact’.

Agent – adopting the FOAF:agent this is a person or organisation.

Observation – an observed phenomena in the natural world cf “data” an observation resulting from an experiment.

As others have already pointed out we’re missing a lot of detail around the role of the agent, we’re missing important predicates, such as other forms of influence other than publication. And looking at it again we’ve failed to include anything about the predictions a theory might make of the natural world. But what else are we missing?