SPARFaBiO is an OWL 2 DL ontology for describing entities that are published or potentially publishable, and that contain or are referred to by bibliographic references. As part of the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies suite, FaBiO provides one of the most comprehensive vocabularies available for modeling the full range of scholarly and general publication types in RDF, structured according to the FRBR conceptual model.
Background
FaBiO was developed by David Shotton (University of Oxford) and Silvio Peroni (University of Bologna), with contributions from Paolo Ciccarese and Tim Clark. The ontology was first described in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Web Semantics, alongside the CiTO (Citation Typing Ontology) vocabulary. FaBiO arose from the need for an ontology that could describe the diverse types of entities encountered in scholarly publishing while maintaining alignment with the well-established FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model from the library science community.
The SPAR Ontologies suite was created to provide a comprehensive set of orthogonal, interoperable ontologies for every aspect of the scholarly publishing process -- from document types and bibliographic metadata (FaBiO) through citation relationships (CiTO), bibliographic references (BiRO), roles (PRO), and document components (DoCO).
Purpose & Scope
FaBiO covers an exceptionally broad range of publication and document types. Its classes are organized according to the four FRBR levels:
- Works -- abstract intellectual creations (e.g., a research paper as a conceptual entity)
- Expressions -- specific intellectual realizations of a Work (e.g., the text of a particular version of a paper)
- Manifestations -- physical or digital embodiments (e.g., the PDF of a paper, a hardback book)
- Items -- individual exemplars (e.g., a specific copy of a book on a shelf)
Publication types modeled by FaBiO include journal articles, conference papers, books, book chapters, theses, datasets, software, patents, reports, blog posts, web pages, newspapers, legal documents, clinical trial reports, and many more -- several hundred classes in total. Additional properties extend the FRBR data model by linking Works directly to Manifestations and Items.
Key Publication Type Classes
| Class | FRBR Level | Description |
|---|---|---|
| JournalArticle | Expression | An article in a scholarly journal |
| ConferencePaper | Expression | A paper presented at a conference |
| Book | Work | A monographic publication |
| Dataset | Work | A structured collection of data |
| Thesis | Work | A dissertation or thesis |
| Patent | Work | A patent document |
| WebPage | Expression | A page on the World Wide Web |
| BlogPost | Expression | A post on a blog |
| ComputerProgram | Expression | A software application |
Serializations & Technical Formats
FaBiO is published with the namespace IRI http://purl.org/spar/fabio. The current version (2.1) has the version IRI http://purl.org/spar/fabio/2019-02-19. The ontology imports the SPAR FRBR ontology (http://purl.org/spar/frbr). It is available in OWL formats and can be visualized using the LODE (Live OWL Documentation Environment) tool, which generates the HTML specification page.
Governance & Maintenance
FaBiO is maintained as part of the SPAR Ontologies project by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni. The source is hosted on GitHub under the sparontologies organization. The ontology is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). Version 2.1 was released on 19 February 2019.
Notable Implementations
- OpenCitations -- the open scholarly citation database uses FaBiO and other SPAR ontologies as its core data model
- Semantic Lancet -- a project applying semantic technologies to Elsevier publication data using SPAR ontologies
- Scholarly Linked Data -- numerous institutional repositories and research information systems use FaBiO for publication type classification
- Wikidata -- FaBiO classes have influenced the modeling of publication types in Wikidata
Related Standards
FaBiO is part of the SPAR Ontologies suite, which includes CiTO (Citation Typing Ontology), BiRO (Bibliographic Reference Ontology), C4O (Citation Counting and Context Characterization Ontology), PRO (Publishing Roles Ontology), DoCO (Document Components Ontology), and others. It is related to BIBO (Bibliographic Ontology), which takes a similar but non-FRBR-aligned approach, and to the FRBR conceptual model from which its class hierarchy derives.