Building Complex Research Collections in Digital Libraries: A Survey of Ontology Implications

Bibliographic metadata standards are a longstanding mechanism for Digital Libraries to manage records and express relationships between them. As digital scholarship, particularly in the humanities, incorporates and manipulates these records in an increasingly direct manner, existing systems are proving insufficient for providing the underlying addressability and relational expressivity required to construct and interact with complex research collections. In this paper we describe motivations for these "worksets" and the technical requirements they raise. We survey the coverage of existing bibliographic ontologies in the context of meeting these scholarly needs, and finally provide an illustrated discussion of potential extensions that might fully realize a solution.