ACTIVITY TYPES

Scholarly Ontology allows the indirect linking of concepts through the various Type classes. Especially in the case of ActivityType the hierarchically organized lexical terms serve multiple purposes: (1) they denote the nature of activities; (2) they provide context for other SO relations (e.g. employs, usesTool, etc.) and function as semantic bridge between various perspectives; (3) they provide a retrieval index; (4) they function as a “gateway” through which other taxonomic structures (along with the resources annotated by them) can be imported/mapped (e.g. TaDIRAH, Oxford ICT, etc.).

SEMANTIC LEVELS

In Scholarly Ontology (SO) the classes Activity and Method capture the distinction between describing how a deliberate act was actually carried out and describing a preconceived way for carrying out this type of activity. More generally, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ aspects of scholarly domain, as captured by the Method, ResearchQuestion and Goal concepts, can be considered to represent a ‘methodological level’ concerning non-factual entities that prescribe how or explain why things are done. Conversely, the ‘what’ and ‘who’ aspects, as captured by concepts such as: Activity, InformationResource, Tool and Actor, represent factual entities of the scholarly domain and thus arguably belong to a ‘factual level’.

Type on the other hand, comprising the various kinds of controlled vocabularies employed for classification purposes, such as ActivityType, InformationResourceType, MediaType, TopicKeyword, can be regarded as a semantic bridge between the methodological and factual levels. This indirect linking of concepts through the various types generates patterns that can be exploited in designing reusable access structures and rules based on the interplay of intentionality and functionality properties.