The SUDO Ontology is an ontology for representing ideas, issues, arguments, and approaches in scientific research and scholarly communication.
Nipun D. Pathirage
Scientific literature communicates knowledge not only through data and results but also through structured scholarly discourse, including motivations, problems, proposed ideas, supporting evidence, and claims. These abstract components are distributed across documents and connected through citations, making them difficult to extract and represent automatically. Existing scholarly knowledge graphs largely focus on metadata or citation networks, offering limited support for modeling scientific intent and argumentation.
The SUDO Graph addresses this limitation by introducing an ontology-centered framework that captures both concrete document structure and abstract scholarly discourse in a unified knowledge graph. The framework integrates layout-aware document parsing, ontology-guided extraction with large language models, and structured RDF instantiation. In addition, it models provenance information for all knowledge graph construction operations and adopts the PAV ontology to manage versioning and lineage of extracted instances. This design enables interpretable, evolvable, and semantically grounded scholarly knowledge graphs suitable for advanced querying, reasoning, and machine-assisted knowledge discovery.
https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
2025-12-29
Tetherless World Constellation | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
SUDO Ontology
https://w3id.org/twc/sudo/ontology#
The Idea Graph is a framework for constructing ontology-driven scholarly knowledge graphs from scientific literature. It models scientific publications across three interconnected layers: document structure, extracted information, and abstract scholarly discourse such as research problems, ideas, evidence, and claims. The framework employs a discourse-aware ontology inspired by argumentation theory to align textual grounding, rhetorical intent, and citation attribution. An end-to-end pipeline transforms scientific PDFs into RDF graphs using layout-preserving parsing and ontology-guided large language model extraction. To ensure transparency and reproducibility, the system explicitly represents knowledge graph construction provenance and integrates the PAV ontology for instance-level versioning and lineage tracking. The resulting graphs support semantic querying, retrieval-augmented generation, and interactive visualization of discourse structures and citation roles.
3.4.0
Formatting and URI update of SUDO Ontology version 3.2.0.
Copyright (c) 2026 TWC
The citing entity cites the cited entity, either directly and explicitly (as in the reference list of a journal article), indirectly (e.g. by citing a more recent paper by the same group on the same topic), or implicitly (e.g. as in artistic quotations or parodies, or in cases of plagiarism).
cites
A structured element contains another generic element.
contains
skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel and skos:hiddenLabel are pairwise disjoint properties.
The range of skos:altLabel is the class of RDF plain literals.
alternative label
skos:closeMatch is used to link two concepts that are sufficiently similar that they can be used interchangeably in some information retrieval applications. In order to avoid the possibility of "compound errors" when combining mappings across more than two concept schemes, skos:closeMatch is not declared to be a transitive property.
has close match
B belongs to A, B is a feature of A, B is under A domain.
E.g. prior knowledge of the model genre-specific regularities of discourse structure English text in science domain
feature of
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
B is a part of A...
E.g. The system includes two models: speech recognition and natural language understanding We inc
part of
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
Recommended practice is to describe the date, date/time, or period of time as recommended for the property Date, of which this is a subproperty.
Date Issued
Date of formal issuance of the resource.
Recommended practice is to refer to the subject with a URI. If this is not possible or feasible, a literal value that identifies the subject may be provided. Both should preferably refer to a subject in a controlled vocabulary.
Subject
A topic of the resource.
A name given to the resource.
Title
The position of an item in a series or sequence of items.
position
The number of citations received by a scholarly publication, work, or other citable resource according to a specified bibliographic source or index.
citation count
A compilation of documents published from an event, such as a conference.
Proceedings
An element of a document that carries out a rhetorical function.
discourse element
A self-contained unit of discourse that deals with a particular point or idea. Paragraphs contains one or more sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line, which may be indented or separated by a small vertical space by the preceding paragraph.
paragraph
A logical division of the text, usually numbered and/or titled, which may contain subsections.
section
The title of a section.
section title
An expression in natural language forming a single grammatical unit. A sentence minimally consists of a subject and an intransitive verb, or a subject, a transitive verb and an object, and may include additional dependent clauses. In written text, a sentence is always terminated by a full stop. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, a question, an exclamation, a request or a command.
sentence
A scholarly work that reports original research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical or experimental aspects of a particular scholarly domain.
E.g. see http://iswc2018.semanticweb.org/call-for-research-track-papers/.
research paper
A Person.
(foaf) Person
An Argument Proposition that presents, applies, or operationalizes a method, system, framework, dataset construction process, experimental setup, or other scholarly means used to address an Issue or realize an Idea. Approaches capture how a publication proposes to act on, investigate, or solve a research problem.
approach
An Argument Proposition that introduces a proposed insight, hypothesis, design principle, conceptual direction, or motivating proposal that guides the publication's response to an Issue. Ideas often motivate one or more concrete Approaches but may remain more conceptual than implementation-specific.
idea
An Argument Proposition that identifies a research problem, limitation, gap, challenge, question, or motivating condition addressed by the publication. Issues provide the argumentative context to which Ideas and Approaches respond.
issue
Argument
feature of
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
part of
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
backs
is valid unless
Recommended practice is to identify the creator with a URI. If this is not possible or feasible, a literal value that identifies the creator may be provided.
Creator
An entity responsible for making the resource.
A source-grounded, paper-local mention of a scholarly object, method, dataset, metric, task, term, or other noun-phrase referent. Artifacts preserve the original textual expression of concepts within a publication and may be aligned to canonical Concepts across papers.
artifact
A situation that, by means other than motivating a violational or non-violational action caused the situation presented in the artifact.
cause
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
The proposition providing the situation presents the framework for interpreting the artifact.
circumstance
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A canonical scholarly concept that provides a cross-publication identity for recurring paper-local Artifact mentions. Concepts abstract over source-specific phrasings while preserving links to the Artifacts through which they are expressed in individual publications
concept
A realization of the situation presented in the proposition enables the realization of the situation presented in the artifact.
condition
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A Proposition that contextualizes, qualifies, characterizes, or elaborates an Artifact or another Proposition rather than advancing the publication's main research argument. Descriptors preserve local explanatory, evaluative, definitional, and conditional details that give scholarly concepts and statements their paper-specific meaning.
descriptor
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Additional details about the situation or some element of subject matter related to the artifact.
elaboration
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
a proposition related the situation in the artifact to degree of context's positive regards toward the situation presented in the artifact.
evaluation
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
B is a hyponym of A, B is a type of A.
E.g. TUIT is a software library NLP applications such as machine translation and language generation
hyponym of
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
a proposition relates the situation presented in the artifact to a framework of ideas not involved in the artifact itself.
interpretation
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Data, datasets, resources, Corpus, Knowledge base. - e.g. image data, speech data, stereo images, bilingual dictionary, paraphrased questions, CoNLL, Panntreebank, WordNet, Wikipedia, etc.
material
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
Methods , models, systems to use, or tools, components of a system, frameworks. - e.g. language model, CORENLP, POS parser, kernel method, etc.
method
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
Metrics, measures, or entities that can express quality of a system/method. - e.g. F1, BLEU, Precision, Recall, ROC curve, mean reciprocal rank, mean-squared error, robustness, time complexity, etc.
metric
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
A source-grounded representation of the meaning expressed by a finite clause in a publication. Propositions preserve what the author asserts, proposes, explains, evaluates, qualifies, or otherwise communicates, and serve as first-class nodes for modeling scholarly discourse and relations that cannot be reduced to entity-to-entity triples.
proposition
A situation to be realized through the activity in the artifact.
purpose
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
a proposition restates the artifact, where the proposition and the artifact are of comparable bulk.
restatement
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A Proposition presets a situation that could ahve been caused by the situation presented in the artifact.
result
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
The proposition representing the situation that solves by the artifact.
solutionhood
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A restatement of the content of the artifact, that is shorter in bulk.
summary
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Applications, problems to solve, systems to construct. - e.g. information extraction, machine reading system, image segmentation, etc.
task
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
General terms or pronouns that may refer to a entity but are not themselves informative, often used as connection words.
term
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602
the situation presented in the proposition as a cause for the volitional or non-violation action presented in the artifact
causes
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Relates one Proposition to another Proposition when the source acknowledges a limitation, exception, counterpoint, or opposing consideration while leaving the target proposition still relevant or defensible. This predicate is derived from the RST Concession relation.
concede
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
recognizes how the realization of the situation presented in artifact depends on the realization of the situation presented in the proposition.
condition
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
the proposition provides the framework for interpreting the reference artifact.
contextualizes
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Relates one Proposition to another Proposition that it contrasts with, opposes, or presents as an alternative perspective. This predicate is derived from the RST Antithesis relation.
contrast
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
The proposition presents additiona detail about the situation or some element of subject mattern which is presentes in the artifact or inferentially accessible in N in one or more of the way listed below;
set: member
abstract : instance
whole : part
process : step
object : attribute
generalization : specific
elaborates
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
potential ability to perform the action presented in artifact increases
enables
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
situation presented in the proposition assess the sutiation presented in the artifact and recognizes the value it assigns.
evaluates
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
evidence
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A qualifier that expresses as degree of force concerning a claim of an argument.
http://purl.org/spar/amo/forces
forces
the situation presented in the artifact to a framework of ideas not involved in the knowledge presented in the artifact itself.
interprets
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Relates one Proposition to another Proposition when the source provides a reason, explanation, or argumentative basis that makes the target acceptable or warranted. This predicate is derived from the RST Justify relation.
justify
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
A warrant that points to a claim from the related evidence within an argument.
http://purl.org/spar/amo/leadsTo
leads to
Relates a Proposition to an Artifact that is explicitly mentioned in the Proposition's source text, without asserting a more specific semantic role between them.
mentions
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
desire to perform action presented in the artifact is increased
motivates
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
An evidence that founds a claim of an argument.
http://purl.org/spar/amo/proves
proves
the activity in the artifact is initiated in order to realize the proposition.
purposes
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
Relates a Proposition to another Proposition that it addresses as a motivating problem, question, need, or proposed response. This predicate is used both when an Idea responds to an Issue and when an Approach responds to an Issue by operationalizing a way to address it.
response to
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
a proposition as a restatement of the artifact.
restates
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
recognizes that the situation presented in the artifact, could be a cuase for the action or situation presented in the proposition.
result
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
The artifact is a solution to the problem stated in the proposition.
solves
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
a proposition as a shorter restatement of the artifact.
summarizes
https://www.sfu.ca/rst/05bibliographies/bibs/ISI_RS_87_190.pdf
An evidence that supports a warrant of an argument.
http://purl.org/spar/amo/supports
supports
B is used for A, B models A, A is trained on B, B exploits A, A is based on B.
E.g. The TISPER system has been designed to enable many text applications.
used for
http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09602