The SWRC ontology – semantic web for research communities

Representing knowledge about researchers and research communities is a prime use case for distributed, locally maintained, interlinked and highly structured information in the spirit of the Semantic Web. In this paper we describe the publicly available ‘Semantic Web for Research Communities’ (SWRC) ontology, in which research communities and relevant related concepts are modelled. We describe the design decisions that underlie the ontology and report on both experiences with and known usages of the SWRC Ontology. We believe that for making the Semantic Web reality the re-usage of ontologies and their continuous improvement by user communities is crucial. Our contribution aims to provide a description and usage guidelines to make the value of the SWRC explicit and to facilitate its re-use.