Best vocabulary for converting BibTeX to RDF?

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#1

What's the best RDF Schema vocabulary or OWL ontology for expressing BibTeX bibliographies in RDF?

Ideally, the vocabulary would be actively maintained, have a decent spec, be supported by converters to and from BibTeX format, and in use at several sites that publish bibliographical data.

Extra points if it's easy to use with RDFa, for embedding into an HTML bibliography.

Edit: Jakob below asked about my use case, so here it is. My own publications currently live in at least four places: my BibTeX file, my homepage, my institute's homepage, and my university's library website. So a new publication is entered four times, by me and the institute webmaster and the university librarian. Once should be enough. I'm tempted to make the BibTeX file the primary representation, because there are good tools for managing that file, and find ways of deriving the other representations from it.

Edit: Candidates mentioned so far are:

  • BIBO — much more general than BibTeX, lots of useful properties
  • CiTO — lots of useful classes for academic documents
  • SWRC (see Paper with documentation) — outdated and unmaintained
  • bibTeX in OWL — outdated and unmaintained, but closest to BibTeX

Not RDF, but useful and with working implementations:

Potentially useful code:

  • JavaBib is a BibTeX parser in Java
  • Bibster is a desktop tool that imports BibTeX and exports RDF. It's from 2004. Source code (Java; I poked around and had trouble figuring out where the BibTeX parser is)
#2

BIBO and/or Cito might be good choices, although I don't think there are any existing converters to/from BibTeX.

#3

Don't forget about Dublin Core. dcterms:title & dcterms:description is accepted by many consumers.

The only realistic way to create a reliable round trip is to use one that explicitly models the BibTeX structure. Such as; http://zeitkunst.org/bibtex/0.1/

Don't forget you can always overload your RDF. You could provide ALL the data in the bibtex predicates, then add dublin core & bibo where it's easy.

#4

DBLP, a well known bibliography index for Computer Sciences know exposes references either in bibtex or in RDF.

For instance : http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/page/publications/journals/ai/HendlerB10

The ontology used can be found at http://ontoware.org/swrc/, and is described in this paper http://www.aifb.kit.edu/web/Inproceedings1003

But there is no converter too...

#5

Have you checked BibJSON and its export capabilities? Mainly they're using BIBO with some extensions. For examples, check with Jim Pitman (and if you do bug him to just post them rather than leaving dummy links in).

#6

For completeness it is worth pointing out that even without the planned BIBO support Zotero imports wide range of formats including BibTeX and stores and exports its data as RDF. It fails your criteria in that "Zotero RDF" doesn't seem to have a standalone spec and isn't directly used for publication but is normally internal to the tool. They seem to use mostly DC with a bit of FOAF, PRISM and Biblio as the vocabularies. It's a great reference manager though.