The large-scale analysis of scholarly artifact usage is constrained primarily by current practices in usage data archiving, privacy issues concerned with the dissemination of usage data, and the lack of a practical ontology for modeling the usage domain. As a remedy to the third constraint, this article presents a scholarly ontology that was engineered to represent those classes for which large-scale bibliographic and usage data exists, supports usage research, and whose instantiation is scalable to the order of 50 million articles along with their associated artifacts (e.g. authors and journals) and an accompanying 1 billion usage events. The real world instantiation of the presented abstract ontology is a semantic network model of the scholarly community which lends the scholarly process to statistical analysis and computational support. We present the ontology, discuss its instantiation, and provide some example inference rules for calculating various scholarly artifact metrics.
Log analysis can be a primary source of knowledge about how digital library patrons actually use DL systems and services and how systems behave while trying to support user information seeking activities. Log recording and analysis allow evaluation assessment, and open opportunities to improvements and enhanced new services. In this paper, we propose an XML-based digital library log format standard that captures a rich, detailed set of system and user behaviors supported by current digital library services. The format is implemented in a generic log component tool, which can be plugged into any digital library system. The focus of the work is on interoperability, reusability, and completeness. Specifications, implementation details, and examples of use within the MARIAN digital library system are described.  Although recording of usage data is common in scholarly information services, its exploitation for the creation of value-added services remains limited due to concerns regarding, among others, user privacy, data validity, and the lack of accepted standards for the representation, sharing and aggregation of usage data. This paper presents a technical, standards-based architecture for sharing usage information, which we have designed and implemented. In this architecture, OpenURL-compliant linking servers aggregate usage information of a specific user community as it navigates the distributed information environment that it has access to. This usage information is made OAI-PMH harvestable so that usage information exposed by many linking servers can be aggregated to facilitate the creation of value-added services with a reach beyond that of a single community or a single information service. This paper also discusses issues that were encountered when implementing the proposed approach, and it presents preliminary results obtained from analyzing a usage data set containing about 3,500,000 requests aggregated by a federation of linking servers at the California State University system over a 20 month period.