The first step towards the semantic layer of science: KLEENK adds support for CiTO

Quite a few of our users have asked us what exactly we expect as kleenk types and up until now our answer was: anything. Indeed, a kleenk can represent anything from a simple citation, to a generalization of a result, to a review or a critique. We deliberately left researchers enter any type they want between two papers so that popular types can emerge and ontologies be created bottom up. However, a little guidance and standardization is always welcome. A great effort that has been made in studying the different type of relations between papers is the Open Citations Project. For a quick overview of the project we recommend this blog post. "The Open Citations Project is global in scope [...] and it aims to make it possible to publish bibliographic information in RDF and to make citations links as easy to traverse as Web links."


One important part of the project is represented by the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) ontologies. Among the eight proposed ontologies there is CiTO (Citation Typing Ontology) whose purpose is to characterize the nature of citations by defining a set of 67 types such as "agrees with", "disputes", "gives background to", "uses data from" or "supports". We believe that the types defined in this ontology are of great value as they describe the most general classes of relations between papers.

We are pleased to announce that KLEENK has now explicit support for CiTO types. Whenever a researcher creates a kleenk, they can choose the type from the list of predefined types, which corresponds to the types described in the CiTO ontology. Of course, they can always choose to enter a new type. 

 

We believe that it is important for researchers to familiarize themselves with a set of kleenk types, understand them and use them accordingly. Integrating CiTO is just a first step towards our support for general ontologies describing types of relations between scientific papers. Also, domain specific ontologies will play a very important role in the types of kleenks and full support for such ontologies will be added in the near future.
 
We will close with a few words about the importance of using ontologies in the KLEENK platform. Kleenks are created by the research community and they belong to the research community to be explored, visualized and used in new ways. Soon we will release the first version of our API which will allow third party applications to integrate with and use kleenks. One very important aspect is providing kleenks as semantic data, in the form of RDF triples. Having kleenk types being part of standard ontologies such as CiTO will allow kleenks to be used by existing semantic web tools.  We believe the KLEENK platform can help researchers create the missing semantic layer on top of the big web of scientific publications.