SEO: A Scientific Events Data Model

Scientific events have become a key factor of scholarly communication for many scientific domains. They are considered as the focal point for establishing scientific relations between scholarly objects such as people (e.g., chairs and participants), places (e.g., location), actions (e.g., roles of participants), and artifacts (e.g., proceedings) in the scholarly communication domain. Metadata of scientific events have been made available in unstructured or semi-structured formats, which hides the interconnected and complex relationships between them and prevents transparency. To facilitate the management of such metadata, the representation of event-related information in an interoperable form requires a uniform conceptual modeling. The Scientific Events Ontology (OR-SEO) has been engineered to represent metadata of scientific events. We describe a systematic redesign of the information model that is used as a schema for the event pages of the OpenResearch.org community wiki, reusing well-known vocabularies to make OR-SEO interoperable in different contexts. OR-SEO is now in use on thousands of OpenResearch.org events pages, which enables users to represent structured knowledge about events without having to deal with technical implementation challenges and ontology development themselves.