Semantic Web Conference Ontology

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This copyright applies to the Semantic Web Conference Ontology (SWC) Specification and accompanying documentation in RDF. Regarding underlying technology, SWC uses W3C's RDF technology, an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.

Introduction

The Semantic Web Conference ontology (SWC) is an ontology for describing academic conferences. It was initially designed to support the European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC2007, and later extended for both the following conferences in the ESWC series, as well as in the ISWC series. Historically, the SWC ontology also draws heavily on ontologies developed for ESWC2006 and ISWC2006.

SWC is mainly a convention of how to use classes and properties from other ontologies, most prominently FOAF (for people) and SWRC (their BibTeX elements, for the papers). We are also throwing in some SIOC, Dublin Core and iCal. Our own swc namespace provides the glue for all this, as well as specialised classes for things that have to do with conferences.

Describing Papers

For the basic use case of describing papers, the figure below shows how the main kinds of resources are connected: the paper itself, the authors and their affiliations, and the talk where the paper was presented.

The next figure shows in more detail the kinds of things that can be said about each of the four main entities surrounding a paper.

Roles

One of the basic design choices in SWC is to use role modelling for describing the different functions at a conference, such as chairs, reviewers, etc. For any particular role at a given conference, the swc:Role class or a sub-class will be instantiated. This role instance stands in relation to a person (who plays the role) and an event. The figure below gives an example showing how to model the "Dog Food Tsar" role (the metadata chair) at ISWC+ASWC2007, which was held by Knud Möller (together with Tom Heath, not shown in the figure).

Overview

Classes