A Practical Ontology for the Large-Scale Modeling of Scholarly Artifacts and their Usage Marko A. Rodriguez Johan Bollen Herbert Van de Sompel Digital Library Research & Digital Library Research & Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team Prototyping Team Prototyping Team Los Alamos National Los Alamos National Los Alamos National Laboratory Laboratory Laboratory Los Alamos, NM 87545 Los Alamos, NM 87545 Los Alamos, NM 87545
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT evolution of the amount of publications indexed in Thom- The large-scale analysis of scholarly artifact usage is con- son Scientific’s citation database over the last fifteen years: strained primarily by current practices in usage data archiv- 875,310 in 1990; 1,067,292 in 1995; 1,164,015 in 2000, and ing, privacy issues concerned with the dissemination of usage 1,511,067 in 2005. However, the extent of the scholarly data, and the lack of a practical ontology for modeling the record reaches far beyond what is indexed by Thompson usage domain. As a remedy to the third constraint, this Scientific. While Thompson Scientific focuses primarily on article presents a scholarly ontology that was engineered to quality-driven journals (roughly 8,700 in 2005), they do not represent those classes for which large-scale bibliographic index more novel scholarly artifacts such as preprints de- and usage data exists, supports usage research, and whose posited in institutional or discipline-oriented repositories, instantiation is scalable to the order of 50 million articles datasets, software, and simulations that are increasingly be- along with their associated artifacts (e.g.