The Scholarly Ontology (SO) is an ontology for modelling research processes inspired by Business Process Modelling and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), built on the foundation of CIDOC CRM. The SO is based on empirical research and earlier models originally intended to support the development of digital research infrastructures for the humanities. By virtue of a layered structure that allows the modular incorporation of domain-specific concepts and terminology, SO has a cross-disciplinary character that enables documenting and analyzing research processes unfolding in one or more domains, and, correspondingly, associating data from disparate, domain-specific sources. The basic concepts of the ontology and their semantic relations are defined through four complementary perspectives on scholarly work: activity, procedure, resource and agency. The SO includes an explicit treatment of intentionality and its interplay with functionality, captured by different parts of the model. We discuss the role of types as the semantic bridge between those two parts. The SO provides the conceptual framework for creating knowledge bases of research processes. Indeed, this has been recently implemented in Research Spotlight (RS), a system that extracts research processes from publications. RS leverages existing information from DBpedia, retrieves publications from repositories, extracts and interrelates various kinds of named and non-named entities by exploiting publication metadata, the structure of text as well as syntactic, lexical and semantic constraints, and populates a knowledge base in the form of RDF triples. In this presentation we introduce SO and discuss aspects related to the application in RS.

Panos Constantopoulos is Professor in the Department of Informatics and former Dean of the School of Information Sciences and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business. He is also affiliated with the Information Management Systems Institute of the “Athena” Research Centre, where he heads the Digital Curation Unit. He has previously been Professor and Chairman in the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete (1986-2003) and Head of the Information Systems Laboratory and the Centre for Cultural Informatics at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (1992-2003). His scientific interests include: knowledge representation and conceptual modelling, ontology engineering, semantic information access, process mining, knowledge management systems, decision support systems, cultural informatics, digital libraries, digital curation and preservation. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (1978), a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University (1979) and a Doctor of Science in Operations Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1983). He has been principal investigator or scientific responsible on the part of his affiliation in 40 national or international research and development projects, in 13 of which project coordinator. He has published over 100 articles in scientific journals, conference proceedings or as book chapters.