The ability to define publishing roles is crucial for providing complete description of a scholarly resource such as a paper or a dataset. While pre-existing ontologies, e.g., [BIBO](http://bibliontology.com/), rely for roles on specific property links, i.e., roles defined through appropriate object properties (e.g., ``<document-uri> :hasAuthor <author-uri>``) or data properties (e.g., ``<author-uri> :hasAffiliation "Author's affiliation"``), none of those are able to satisfy the need for an ease of extendibility (if a new role has to taken into account) and for the simultaneous representation of time periods and contexts. Using [TVC pattern](http://www.essepuntato.it/2012/04/tvc) – i.e., a model for describing scenarios in which something has a value during a particular time and for a particular context – as the basis, we have implemented *PRO*, the *Publishing Roles Ontology*. This ontology permits the characterisation of the roles of agents – people, corporate bodies and computational agents – in the publication process. Furthermore, it allows one to specify the role an agent has in relation to a particular bibliographic entity (as author, editor, reviewer, etc.) or to a specific institution (as publisher, librarian, etc.), and the period during which each role is held. <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="/static/img/spar/pro-diagram.png" alt="The diagram of C4O." /> As shown in the figure above, the main entities of PRO are: * ``pro:RoleInTime``, i.e., the class of the particular situation that describes the role an agent has within a particular time interval; * ``pro:holdsRoleInTime``, i.e., the object property linking any ``foaf:Agent`` (e.g., a person, a group, an organization or a software agent), to a ``pro:RoleInTime`` situation. * ``pro:withRole``, i.e., the object property linking the situation to the role the agent has – the available roles are defined as individuals of the class ``pro:Role`` (see its subclass ``pro:PublishingRole`` for roles specifically defined for the publishing domain); * ``ti:TimeInterval``, i.e., the class for defining two (starting and ending) points in time that define a particular period related to (object property ``tvc:atTime``) a ``pro:RoleInTime`` situation; * ``pro:relatesToDocument``, ``pro:relatesToPerson`` and ``pro:relatesToOrganization``, i.e., the object properties linking any kind of bibliographic work (``foaf:Document``), a person (``foaf:Person``) or publishing organization (``foaf:Organization``) taking part in a ``pro:RoleInTime`` as contextual extent.
The description of the authors of papers and, in particular, which affiliation they have specified in the context of a particular paper is a crucial aspect to take into account when describing authors' roles. However, several existing ontologies, such as the [Semantic Web Conference Ontology](http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/ontology), do not allow one to discern the context in which an person-role association holds. For instance, consider an author having different institutional affiliations in the context of different publications (e.g., because he/she moved from one to the other). In order to address this issue, [PRO](/ontologies/pro) provides a convenient way to describe all the contextualised and possibly time-indexed person-role associations, in order to provide a complete picture of how roles relate with person and in which contexts.
@prefix : <http://www.sparontologies.net/example/> .
@prefix dogfood: <http://data.semanticweb.org/organization/> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix pro: <http://purl.org/spar/pro/> .
@prefix scoro: <http://purl.org/spar/scoro/> .
@prefix ti: <http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/timeinterval.owl#> .
@prefix tvc: <http://www.essepuntato.it/2012/04/tvc/> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
:silvio-peroni a foaf:Person ;
foaf:name "Silvio Peroni" ;
pro:holdsRoleInTime
:silvio-peroni-author ,
:silvio-peroni-at-kmi ,
:silvio-peroni-at-unibo .
:silvio-peroni-author a pro:RoleInTime ;
pro:withRole pro:author ;
pro:relatesToDocument
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89704-0_17> ,
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1600193.1600232> .
:silvio-peroni-at-unibo a pro:RoleInTime ;
pro:withRole scoro:affiliate ;
pro:relatesToDocument
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1600193.1600232> ;
pro:relatesToOrganization
dogfood:university-of-bologna ;
tvc:atTime :unibo-affiliation-time .
:unibo-affiliation-time a ti:TimeInterval ;
ti:hasIntervalStartDate
"2009-01-01T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime .
:silvio-peroni-at-kmi a pro:RoleInTime ;
pro:withRole scoro:affiliate ;
pro:relatesToDocument
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89704-0_17> ;
pro:relatesToOrganization
dogfood:kmi-the-open-university-uk ;
tvc:atTime :kmi-affiliation-time .
:kmi-affiliation-time a ti:TimeInterval ;
ti:hasIntervalStartDate
"2008-04-01T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
ti:hasIntervalEndDate
"2008-09-30T23:59:59Z"^^xsd:dateTime .Please cite the source above with the following reference:
Peroni, Silvio (2015): Example of use of PRO #1. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1538655