-=( In Between )=-

While converting the metadata in our repositories to “RDF”, we (my student Florian Kunneman and I) wanted to express a few simple relations between authors. Initially we thought we could use foaf:knows for people who co-authored a document. But that’s plain silly, of course. We can use foaf:knows, but would need to subclass it.  We would need  something like the extension made by Eric Vitiello’s extension to FOAF to express family relations (you know: friendOf, parentOf, siblingOf, etc).

We would like to extract relations of the following sort:

Author1 cites Author 2
Author1 mentions Author2
Author1 hasCoAuthor Author2
etc..

A problem might be the fact that such relations have to be derived from publications. Take the first example. It would in fact be a derivation from other relations:

Author1 isAuthorOf Document1
Document1 hasCitation Document2
Author2 isAuthorOf Document2
it then could follow that
Author1 cites Author 2

I wonder how I can find work relevant to this question. Perhaps we first need to define relations that can exist between persons and documents, and from that deduce relations between persons (the same goes for documents of course). What are the relations between authors that could interest us?  It may sound silly, perhaps it is, but I don’t know how to proceed (well we could make our own AOAA -Author Of A Author- vocab, but that again sounds silly).