PRO, the Publishing Roles Ontology
PRO, the Publishing Roles Ontology, is an ontology for describing roles in the publication process, or in other scholarly activities or situations, held by particular agent. The role can be specified to exist over a defined period of time, and within a specific context, e.g. with respect to a particular document. PRO forms part of SPAR, a suite of Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies. Other SPAR ontologies are described at http://purl.org/spar/.
PRO, the Publishing Roles Ontology, is an ontology written in OWL 2 DL for the characterization of the roles of agents (people, corporate bodies and computational agents) in the publication process. It permits one to specify how an agent has a role relating to a contextual entity, and the period of time during which that role is held. It is based on the Time-indexed Value in Context (TVC) ontology pattern (http://www.essepuntato.it/2012/04/tvc). It is easy to extend the set of specified roles, simply by adding new individuals to the class pro:PublishingRole. This ontology is imported into SCoRO, the Scholarly Contribution and Roles Ontology (http://purl.org/spar/scoro/), where it is used similarly to enable the description of a wider range of contributions and roles relating to other scholarly activities and entities, including academic administration, funded projects, research investigations, data and authorship, and to define their temporal extents and contexts, as for publishing roles in PRO.
Since roles have contexts and times that are important to take into account (for example, a person can be author of one paper and reviewer of another, while another person will be editor of a journal only for a defined period, not for ever), the PRO ontology permit these contexts to be specified, using an ontological design pattern called the time-indexed value in context (TVC) (http://www.essepuntato.it/2012/04/tvc/) which is imported into PRO. This ontology design pattern permits one to construct the following RDF statements: foaf:Agent pro:holdsRoleInTime [ a pro:RoleInTime pro:withRole pro:editor ] . Thus the domain of pro:withRole is not foaf:Agent, but rather an anonymous member of the class pro:RoleInTime, which itself is the range of the property pro:holdsRoleInTime, for which the domain is foaf:Agent. The range of pro:withRole is the class pro:Role, whose members permit specific roles to be specified. This single step of indirection permits other contextual and temporal attributes (not shown here) to be specified for this member of the class pro:RoleInTime, putting that role into context. Exemplar usage: foaf:Agent pro:holdsRoleInTime [ a pro:RoleInTime pro:withRole pro:editor ] .
This ontology is available at http://purl.org/spar/pro, and uses the namespace prefix pro.
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
holds role in time
A property relating an agent to a role that the agent holds. This is done via the indirection: foaf:Agent pro:holdsRoleInTime [ a pro:RoleInTime ; pro:withRole pro:Role ] . The ontology permits one to specify the time period over which a role is held, and the other contextual entities to which that agent's role relates.
is document context for
A property relating a document to the role for which that document provides the context (e.g. relating a document to the role of author or peer-reviewer of that document).
is role held by
A property relating a role in time that an agent holds, or a contribution situation that an agent makes, to that agent.
is organization context for
A property relating an organization to the role for which that organization provides the context (e.g. relating an institution to the role of member held by a person).
is person context for
A property relating a person to the role for which that person provides the context (e.g. relating a graduate student to the role of supervisor held by a faculty member).
is related to role in time
A property relating an entity to the role for which that entity provides the context.
is role in
The property relating the definition of a specific role to the situation of an agent holding that role.
relates to document
A property relating a time-indexed situation describing a publishing role to a document that represents the context for that situation (e.g. relating the role of editor or peer-reviewer to the document being edited or peer-reviewed).
relates to
A property relating a time-indexed situation to an entity representing the context for that situation.
relates to organization
A property relating a time-indexed situation to an organization that represents the context for that situation (e.g. relating the role of member to the institution of which that person is a member).
relates to person
A property relating a time-indexed situation to a person who represents the context for that situation (e.g. relating the role of an supervisor with respect to the graduate student being supervised).
with role
An object property connecting an agent's role in time to a definition of the type of role held by this agent, specified as an instance of the class pro:Role or of one of its sub-classes.
at time
A time interval during which a role is held or a contribution is made by an agent.
publishing role
A role an agent may have with respect to the publishing process. Individual members of this class are used to specify particular roles.
role
A role an agent may have. Individual members of this class or its sub-classes are used to specify particular roles.
role in time
A particular situation that describe a role an agent may have, that can be restricted to a particular time interval.
A role in time describes always: - a particular role R - a particular agent A holding R - a particular time interval T in which A holds R (optional) - one or more entities (e.g. a particular bibliographic entity or a specific institution) that defines a context for R held by A. (At least one contextual entity should be specified for a particular role).
time interval
Two (starting and ending) points in time that define a particular period of time.
agent
An abstract class defining any kind of agents, such as a person, a group, an organization or a software agent.
document
An abstract class defining any kinds of publishing work.
archivist
The role of a person who manages, undertakes and supervises the work of an archive. [This term is typically used with respect to a document archive, whereas the term data curator is used with respect to a data archive.]
author
The role a person has of authorship of some material (for example a document).
author's agent
A person who finds work for professional authors, manages their contracts, and works to advance their careers, charging their clients as fees for their services a percentage of the money made from the authors' writings.
biographer
The role of an author who writes biographies.
blogger
The role of an author who writes blog posts.
commissioning editor
The role of an editor who actively commissions authors to write books to be published by the publishing house for which the commissioning editor works.
compiler
The role an agent has of compiling a number of items into a compilation or collection.
contributor
The role an agent has of contribution of some material (for example an article to a magazine).
copy editor
The role of an editor who undertakes alterations to the text of a document submitted for publication to improve the formatting, style and accuracy of text, or to bring the text into the house style of the publisher (e.g. Americanization of British spelling), without intentionally altering the substance or meaning of the text.
copyright owner
The role of owning the copyright to a publication, usually held by the author or by the publishing house that publishes the author's work.
critic
The role of an author who writes evaluations and criticisms of, for example, plays or other works of art.
deputy editor
The role of a senior editor of a publication who deputizes for the Editor-in-Chief.
distributor
The role of a person who distributes publications.
editor
The role of a person who selects and prepares for publication material written and submitted by authors.
editor-in-chief
The role of the person who has final responsibility for the editorial operations and policies for a particular publication.
executive editor
The role of an editor who has executive responsibility for the production of particular publication, usually acting under the authority of the Editor-in-Chief.
ghost writer
The role of a professional writer who assists an aspiring author lacking authorship skills to write a book or article for publication, for example by helping the author to create grammatically correct and lucid prose, or who writes the book on behalf of the named author, without himself/herself claiming authorship.
guest editor
The role of someone who is a guest editor, for example for a special themed issue of a journal.
illustrator
The role of an agent that illustrates a document.
journalist
The role of an author who writes newspaper or magazine news reports or articles.
librarian
The role of a person who manages, undertakes and supervises the work of a library.
managing editor
The role of an editor who has management responsibility for the production of particular publication, usually acting under the authority of the Executive Editor and the Editor-in-Chief.
peer reviewer
The role of an academic peer in evaluating a manuscript submitted by an author for publication as a journal article on behalf of the journal editor, or a conference paper on behalf of the conference programme committee, and in deciding whether it is suitable for acceptance, usually subject to revisions suggested by the peer-reviewer.
printer
The role of an agent involved in printing documents, either a company providing printing services or an individual engaged in the process of printing documents.
producer
The role of someone who acts as a producer.
production editor
The role of an editor who takes responsibility for the passage of a document through the various stages of the publication workflow from the submitted manuscript to the final publication, including responsibility for scheduling and budget.
proof reader
The role of a person who reads the proofs of documents to detect any errors prior to final publication.
publisher
The role of a person or an organization that published material, or of a publisher's employee who has responsibility for such publications.
reader
The role of a person who reads publications.
reviewer
The role of a person who subjects a publication to a written review and critical analysis of its content, scope and quality.
senior editor
The role of the person who has senior responsibility for the editorial operations and policies for a particular publication, usually acting under the authority of the Editor-in-Chief.
series editor
The role of the person who has editorial responsibility for publication series, for example a book series.
translator
The role of an agent that translates a document into another language.