Objectives and methods: The present reflexion integrates a doctorate research and is based on bibliographic research. It suggests the interoperability between the cooperative management and information organization tools VIAF/NISI and Open Citations, as favoring standardization in the presentation of references and the use of SPAR ontologies as insertion of scientific references as facilitating elements for the wide recovery and access to information within the context of linked data.

Main results: Several problems are reported in the literature related to failures in the interpretation and use of standards for elaboration of references (DAVIES, 2012; KRATOCHVÍL, 2017). The unnecessary proliferation of standards across institutions generates individual interpretations in each research core and that is reflected in the more than 8.000 bibliographic styles available in the Citation Style Language (CSL) (CSL, c2017) in contradiction with the principles of standardization. There is neither a shared taxonomy that describes the characteristics of other types of documents than books and articles (PERONI, 2015), nor an identification of data about content in the references, not to mention the lack of consensus among publishers regarding to the place of registration of metadata in documents. Shotton (2013) attributes the research practice suffers to the difficulties to accessing citation data and points out the necessity of such data are freely and legally available for sharing and placed in an open repository: the Open Citations. It aims to provide accurate citation data that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law. It suggests the use of SPAR (Semantic Public and Referencing) Ontologies and the treatment of metadata of authorities as expression and manifestation, similar to the FRBR standard. Academic citation data includes the “authority control that consists an important tool for standardization and terminological control of great contribution to the quality of search and retrieval systems operation, in which the unification of values established by VIAF contributes to the aggregation of values covering linguistic and cultural variations, as well as in the sum of metadata provided by institution acting at the national bibliographic control, which provides major coverage on the publications in each country” (ROMANETTO; SANTOS; ALVES, p. 586, 2017). In this context, it is proposed do adopt the philosophy of cooperative work between VIAF/NISI and Open Citations as an alternative to reach a common goal: the registration, organization, and retrieval of information in an standardized way considering, above all, that the increasing use of non-traditional information media has impacted the ways of searching and retrieving information, once tags, hashtags, DOIs (among others) also came to be regarded as search terms. However, such elements are disregarded by the most used bibliographic styles and that potentially reduces the answers to information searches.

Conclusions: The metadata, the semantic web, the authority files relationships, are common concerns to VIAF, to Open Citations, to the ontologies, to references presentation, to FRBR format and also to cataloging. Even so, there are no evidences of cooperative work among such initiatives. Although the majority of papers are still published in the form of static PDF documents, it is necessary to create tools to facilitate the transition of the online paper from its present “horseless carriage” state into the scholarly communication equivalent of a Ferrari. (PERONI, 2015, p. 267). Just like in VIAF and other cooperative work initiatives, the elaboration of references should adopt this working philosophy, considering even the facilities provided by the technologies. The application of SPAR ontologies in the decoding of bibliographic data records, as well as assigning context to references, can make them as or more complete than the cataloging records themselves and equip them as regards the efficiency of information retrieval, as records of metadata readable by the RDF language and, therefore, compatible with the semantic web and with the linked data technology. Solidity and integrity in descriptive and thematic metadata must be a concern not only in the cataloging field but, above all, in the presentation of references, considering them as the primary and accredited source of scientific information. SPAR ontologies may enhance the retrieval rate of documents selected from the purposes of thematic representation, and raise the references from a status of mere lists of documents into selected and interconnected information sources. This configures the insertion of references in the scenario of “academic communication equivalent to a Ferrari”: the linked data.

References

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