In the six months since the release of the dblp RDF dump and its persistent snapshot releases, the RDF dump has been downloaded a total of about a thousand times. We are pleased to see that the community is interested in using our semantic data in their research and beyond. However, based on the feedback we have received and the experience we have had experimenting with query interfaces for the data, we have also noticed a number of shortcomings in our schema that we want to address.
Therefore, as of September 9, 2022, we are changing a few details about the dblp RDF schema. These changes aim (in part) to make the schema more convenient in practice, e.g., in SPARQL interfaces. More importantly, however, we introduce a new type of entity class (called an author’s “signature”) that helps us model more details about the relationships between publications and their creators.
The full list of changes is given below.
Changes
Deprecated dblp:orderedCreators property
The rdf:List entities were impractical when using this property in queries, and we needed a way to add additional metadata to the publication-creator link. Hence, we are dropping dblp:orderedCreators altogether in favor of the more flexible dblp:Signature classes and the new dblp:hasSignature property.
Added dblp:Signature, dblp:AuthorSignature, dblp:EditorSignature classes and dblp:hasSignature property
These new entities represent the attribution link from a publication to a single creator. E.g., if a paper has four authors listed, then the dblp:Publication is linked to four dblp:Signature entities. Each signature is linked to exactly one dblp:Publication and one dblp:Creator, and may list further metadata of the link, like the (mandatory) ordinal of the signature (i.e., n for the n-th author listed on the paper) or any (optional) ORCID listed for that particular linked creator.
Extended the rdfs:domain of dblp:webpage, dblp:archivedWebpage, and dblp:wikipedia to dblp:Entity
We made this change to cover all external website links for all different entities in a more general manner.
Renamed dblp:electronicEdition to dblp:documentPage and dblp:primaryElectronicEdition to dblp:primaryDocumentPage, and deprecated dblp:archivedElectronicEdition
We moved the dblp:Publication resource links under the general umbrella of dblp:webpage. At the same time, we renamed the external links for publications for clarity, and we removed dblp:archivedElectronicEdition since this is already covered by dblp:archivedWebpage.
Renamed dblp:fullCreatorName to dblp:creatorName, and dblp:primaryFullCreatorName to dblp:primaryCreatorName
Those properties were cumbersome to use in queries, so we shortened them.
Deprecated dblp:otherFullCreatorName, dblp:otherAffiliation, dblp:otherHomepage, dblp:otherElectronicEdition properties
The use of the dblp:other* properties were impractical when using in queries. Hence, we are dropping dblp:otherFullCreatorName, dblp:otherAffiliation, dblp:otherHomepage, and dblp:otherElectronicEdition in favor of their parent properties dblp:creatorName, dblp:affiliation, dblp:homepage, and dblp:documentPage.