Using the SPAR ontology network to represent the scientific production of a university: A case study

Abstract

Research is commonly used to measure the prestige of universities. Currently, many universities register some of their scientific production (such as thesis, articles) in open access repositories using technologies like DSpace or ePrints. Likewise, scientific production is available in different and overlapping databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Crossref. Connecting these datasets, with the application of ontologies, will potentially increase their value and help discover interesting relationships amongst them. The present study aims to use the SPAR Ontology Network, which allows representing scholarly publishing, in order to check whether it is possible to represent the scientific production of universities. For that, we propose competency questions with the purpose of measuring scientific production. Likewise, we obtained data from Scopus regarding an Ecuadorian university (University of Guayaquil) and transformed it to RDF using the SPAR Ontology Network and other well-known ontologies to build it semantically. We used SPARQL queries to answer the competency questions. We concluded that the SPAR Ontology Network is a wide-ranging solution for scholarly publishing. Nevertheless, it is necessary to build an extension to one of their ontologies to provide a complete representation of a university’s scientific production.