The pure rhetorical characterisation of document components is not necessarily linked to the structural organisation that a scholarly article may have. For example, some scientific journals require their articles to follow a particular rhetorical segmentation, in order to identify explicitly what the meaningful parts are from a scientific point of view – e.g., *Introduction*, *Background*, *Evaluation*, *Materials*, *Methods* and *Conclusion*. These parts usually, but not necessarily, correspond to the coarse structural parts of the article – its sections. Whilst the background is usually woven together with the introduction, it may also be presented as a separate section, or indeed may substitute for the introduction entirely. The characterisations of these purely rhetorical components, which are not always linked explicitly to a particular structure, are defined in the *Discourse Element Ontology* (*DEO*). DEO was developed by studying different corpora of scientific literature on different topics and publishers' guidelines. It provides a structured vocabulary for rhetorical elements within documents, enabling these to be described in RDF. The main class of this ontology is ``deo:DiscourseElement``, which describes all those elements of a document that carry out a rhetorical function. All the remaining rhetorical behaviours are modelled as subclasses of this class. Some of the DEO entities are aligned with some of the rhetorical blocks from the [SALT Rhetorical Ontology](http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/vocabs/sro) and the [Ontology of Rhetorical Blocks (ORB)](http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/orb/), and extends them by introducing 24 additional classes, including the following eight: * ``deo:Reference``, which specifies a connection either to a specific part of the document or to another publication. In written text, numbered superscripts standing for footnotes, items in a table of contents, and items describing entities in a reference section, can be modelled as individuals of this class; * ``deo:BibliographicReference``, a subclass of the deo:Reference that describes references to other publications, such as journal articles, books, book chapters or websites; such references are often contained in a footnote or a bibliographic reference list; * ``deo:Caption``, that defines the text accompanying another item (e.g., the legend describing a picture); * ``deo:Introduction``, the initial description that states the purpose and goals of the subsequent text; * ``deo:Materials``, that documents the specific materials used in the described work; * ``deo:Methods``, that documents the methods used in the work (may be combined with a description of the materials used); * ``deo:Results``, that describes a report of the specific findings of an investigation; * ``deo:RelatedWork``, that describes a critical review of current knowledge by specific reference to other relevant works, both in terms of substantive findings and theoretical and methodological contributions within a domain of study; * ``deo:FutureWork``, a proposal for new investigations to be undertaken in order to continue and advance the work described in the publication. Note that it is still possible to apply two different rhetorical characterisations to the same block of text. For instance, in journal articles it is common to have a section entitled "Materials and Methods", which can be characterised rhetorically by using both the classes ``deo:Methods`` and ``deo:Materials``. DEO is imported in [DoCO](/ontologies/doco), which is an OWL 2 DL ontology that provides a general-purpose structured vocabulary of document elements.
The [Research Articles in Simplified HTML (RASH)](https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/index.html) format is a markup language that restricts the use of HTML elements for writing academic research articles. In particular, RASH authors to use RDFa annotations within any element of the language. By means of RDFa, [DEO](/ontologies/deo) can be used in RASH documents in order characterise the major rhetorical elements of a a research article, such as the introduction part, the evaluation section, the conclusions and so on.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
prefix="
schema: http://schema.org/
prism: http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/2.0/
deo: http://purl.org/spar/deo/
dcterms: http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<!-- ... -->
<body>
<!-- ... -->
<div
id="sec_intro" class="section"
about="#sec_intro" typeof="deo:Introduction">
<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p>
In the last months of 2014, several posts
within technical mailing lists of the ...
</p>
<!-- ... -->
</div>
<div
id="sec_rationale" class="section"
about="#sec_rationale" typeof="deo:Motivation deo:Model">
<h1>A <q>Web-first</q> framework for research articles</h1>
<p>
Some works, e.g., Capadisli <i>et al.</i>
<a
id="ref_linked_research" class="ref"
about="#ref_linked_research" typeof="deo:Reference"
property="dcterms:references" href="#linked-research"></a>,
suggest not to force any particular HTML ...
</p>
<!-- ... -->
</div>
<div
id="sec_tools" class="section"
about="#sec_tools" typeof="deo:Material">
<h1>Tools in the Framework</h1>
<p>
In this section we introduce all the tools shown...
</p>
<!-- ... -->
</div>
<div
id="sec_conclusions" class="section"
about="#sec_conclusions" typeof="deo:Conclusion">
<h1>Conclusions</h1>
<p>
In this paper we have introduced the <i>RASH Framework</i>,
i.e., a set of specifications and tools for writing...
<span
id="bloc_future_works"
about="#bloc_future_works" typeof="deo:FutureWork">
As immediate future developments, we plan to create
additional scripts for extracting RDF statements
from RASH documents according to SPAR Ontologies...
</span>
</p>
</div>
<!-- ... -->
</body>
</html>Please cite the source above with the following reference:
Peroni, Silvio (2015): Example of use of DEO #1. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1540796