The Nature ontologies portal is new section of the nature.com site that describes our involvement with semantic technologies and also makes available to the wider public several models and datasets as RDF linked data.

We launched the portal nearly a month ago, to the purpose of sharing our experiences with semantic technologies and more generally to contribute to the wider linked data community with our data models and datasets.

This April 2015 release doubles the number and size of our published data models. This now spans more completely the various things that our world contains, from publication things – articles, figures, etc. – to classification things – article-types, subjects, etc. – and additional things used to manage our content publishing operation – assets, events, etc. Also included is a release page for the latest data release and a separate page for archival data releases.

Background

Is this the first time you've heard about semantic web and ontologies?   Then you should know that even though internally at Macmillan Science and Education XML remains the main technology used to represent and store the things we publish, the metadata about these documents (e.g. publication details, subject categories etc..) are normally encoded also using a more abstract, graph-oriented information model.   This is called RDF and has two key characteristics: - it encodes all information in the form of triples e.g.